My most favorite sourdough bread recipe, which I prepare regularly. Delicious and easy to prepare – you need only sourdough starter, flour, water, salt, and caraway seeds.
Motivation & history
A long time ago, I guess in 2013, I and my girlfriend (now wife) bought a home bakery machine. It was quite funny to prepare our bread and we used it regularly, but then it got broken for some reason and we had to claim it. Suddenly, we had no option to make our bread! So I tried to find a way, how to prepare home-baked bread without a bakery machine. The first try was not very successful, but I continued and after a few attempts, I was able to finish a so-so bread.
Then we received the bakery machine back, but I realized that we don’t need it and that it is fun for me to prepare the bread by hand. So we gave the bakery machine to my mother-in-law, who use it for mixing dough. The bread was baked using dried yeast and it was not so different from a classical supermarket bread.
Through the time I found that there exists something called sourdough, I tried to start it, failed, failed, failed, and once succeeded. Then I forgot that the sourdough is in the fridge and it went bad, so I had to start from scratch. The next blog post could be aimed at sourdough and its starting, feeding, and cultivation.
Ingredients
- 2 spoons of sourdough starter
- 120 + 100 grams of rye flour
- 250 grams of wheat flour
- 6 grams of salt
- 2 grams of caraway seeds
- water (not hot, approx. at room temperature)
Procedure
Below you can find my procedure of preparing a sourdough bread. I guess there might exist better recipes and more advanced methods, but I use this one and the result is great for me.
Of course, there are possible variants of the bread, for example, I use a mixture of whole grain and plain flour (usually 50:50).
Sourdough starter feeding
Take a sourdough starter from your refrigerator and dilute it by adding 180 grams of water. Mix the starter and water to homogeneous liquid and pour it into a bowl, which you will then use for dough mixing. Add 120 grams of rye flour and mix. You’ve just fed the sourdough starter!
Now you can cover the bowl up with dishtowel and wait for the starter to expand. The expansion rate and the needed time depends on many factors, like temperature, starter maturity, type of flour, etc. I usually feed the starter in the evening and let it expand through the night (8-12 hours).
During that time the starter should firstly expand and then slightly fall – this is the right time to use it.
Saving the starter
If you want to bake another bread in the future (probably yes), now it is the right time to save some part of the starter. Take approx. 2 spoons of the starter and put it into a storage container and the refrigerator.
Here you can see the consistency of the starter – it could be full of bubbles or it might be not, but in this case, you need to be sure that it expanded and fell (sourdough residues on bowl walls, etc.). The fed part of the starter is sometimes called “levain”.
Dough preparation
From the last step, you have approx. 300 grams of sourdough starter (levain) in your bowl. Now add the rest of the ingredients (150 g of water, 100 g of rye flour, 250 g of wheat flour, 6 g of salt, and 2 g of caraway seeds. Use a mixer to make a consistent and slightly sticky dough, it will take approx. 10 minutes (or you can make it by your hands of course).
From my experience, it is better to put the liquid ingredients into the bowl first and after that, you can add the others (like flour, etc.). This can help the mixer to process the dough properly and it holds not only for the bread dough.
When the dough is ready, take it from the bowl using a spatula and put it on the kneading pad, which has to be powdered by (rye) flour. Then knead the dough several times to remove the air from it and make a nice dough ball.
Now cover it by dishtowel and let it get mature for an hour.
After that, the dough will have a higher volume (up to twice) and the folds will be polished.
Now it is the right time to knead the dough for the second time and transfer it into a breadbasket (banneton basket). You also have to powder it with flour, I use the rye one.
You would probably guess that you should cover the basket with the dough by a dishtowel and let it rise.
After several hours (typically 3-8, dependent on temperature and other conditions), the dough should fill the basket and it could rise slightly above the edge.
The bread dough is ready for baking!
Bread baking
Turn on the oven and preheat it to a temperature of 250 °C. It is necessary to make water vapor inside the oven, there are several possibilities:
- Use a flower sprayer bottle to spray water on oven walls
- Put a deep baking tray to the lower part of the oven and pour boiling water into it
Or you can find any other method to prepare water vapor in the oven or combine the two possibilities above. The vapor allows the bread to expand inside the oven if you skip this step, the bread will get solid crust at the beginning of baking and it will not be allowed to rise in the oven.
It is better to leave the baking tray in the oven, otherwise, the oven temperature will fall when you put the cool tray into it.
So transfer the dough on a sheet of baking paper, the easiest way is to put the paper and a cutting board on the bread basket, rotate it all upside down and remove the basket.
Now you can decorate the bread, I use a simple cross cut in the center, as it also helps the bread to expand in the oven.
Then put the bread on the baking paper into the oven (which needs to be at a temperature of 250 °C with a lot of water vapor) and bake for 5 minutes.
The bread will rise slightly and will get almost the final shape. You can now decrease the oven temperature, I use 195 °C and I bake for an additional 55 minutes until it gets lovely crust and you will also experience the pleasant smell of the bread.
The temperature and baking time might vary depending on your oven. For example, I use 10 °C higher temperatures compared to instructions in recipes.
The last step is to pull the bread from the oven and let it cool down on a cooling rack.
I hope you will find this recipe useful and I believe you will enjoy the bread!