How I Bake Sourdough Bread

The recipe I use routinely for baking bread is the recipe for "San Francisco Sourdough" recipe from pp. 190-191 of Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker: Classic Regional Breads from Europe and America.

The key difference between baking with natural leavening, i.e. sourdough starter, and commercial manufactured yeast is that the starter must be grown and risen ("refreshed") multiple times before it is formed into loaves for its final rising.

When you make bread with commercial yeast, you can add as much yeast as you need to ferment starches in the dough and produce the gas that inflates the crumb. With natural leavening, the yeasts in the starter must be allowed to grow and multiply until there are enough of them to do the same job.

The recipe I use takes three refreshments, taking something like a day and a half from the time I put the first ingredients together to the time I take the baked bread out of the oven.

On the morning before the day I plan to bake, I begin my first refreshment:

1/2 cup (approximately) of sourdough starter
1/2 cup very warm water
1 cup flour
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Place the starter in a small mixing bowl, and add the warm water. With a fork, mash the starter around in the water until it softens and begins to dissolve, and continue mixing and beating it (like a batter) until the consistency of the liquid is smooth.

Add flour to the liquid a little at a time, and blend it in. Eventually the liquid will become a paste, and then a dough. Turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, scraping out the drier bits of dough and remnants of flour. Knead the dough mixture until it is smooth.

Place the resulting ball of dough in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and leave in a warm, draft-free place to rise. (I use my gas oven, kept warm by its pilot light.)

Allow this dough to rise for six hours or more. The ideal time to move to the next stage is just after the dough has risen to its full extent and starts to fall back. Letting it wait longer is not detrimental, though.

At the end of this process, scrape the resulting risen dough (it's called a "sponge") onto a floured surface. Divide it into two equal pieces (I use a pastry knife, a broad square of sheet-metal with a wooden handle on one side, for this; it is easy enough to make do with a butter knife). The sponge can be gooey and sticky, making it difficult to handle. It can be tamed by sprinkling it with liberal quantities of flour. Set aside one of the two pieces: it is your starter for the next time you bake.

The other piece of sponge goes into the next step, the second refreshment:

The sponge from the previous refreshment
3/4 cup cool water
1 3/4 cup flour
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Place the sponge in a bowl, and pour the water over it. Mash the starter around in the water with a fork, as before, until it softens and dissolves, and continue beating the mixture until it becomes a liquid of smooth consistency.

Gradually add the flour to the mixture, blending it with the fork. As the mixture thickens, you may wish to switch over to stirring with a wooden spoon. (I use not a spoon, but a bamboo paddle intended for serving rice. It does double-duty as a mixing spoon and as a dough scraper quite admirably.) When the mixture has transformed from liquid into dough, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, scraping the remnants out of the bowl, and knead it for a couple of minutes, until its consistency is smooth.

(Notice that this procedure is almost identical to that of the first refreshment, except with more flour and water added.)

Place the ball of dough in a bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and place in a warm, draft-free place to rise.

Again, the ideal time to move to the next step is just after the sponge has risen to its full extent and begun to diminish. Letting it go for longer, though, does not cause problems (except the top dries and hardens if you let it go for too long). Personally, I leave it to rise overnight.

Then, on the following morning, I begin the final refreshment:

All of the sponge from the previous stage
2 1/4 cups of lukewarm water
5 cups flour
1 Tbsp salt
[Refer to my comments below on ingredients.]

Mix the sponge and the water together thoroughly, until the resulting liquid has a smooth consistency. (At home, I do this with my Kitchenaid mixer, using its paddle attachment. If you don't have a mixer, or if you insist that the bread you make be completely handmade, this can be done instead with a fork and a wooden spoon, as before.) Gradually add the flour and mix it in. (With my mixer, I switch from the paddle to the dough hook after adding the second cup of flour).

When all of the flour is blended in, leave the dough in its mixing bowl to sit for fifteen minutes or so. This lets a process known as "autolysis" take place. The water in the dough soaks into the gluten of the wheat flour, and the fibers of gluten protein loosen and relax. This makes for a slacker dough, much easier to knead than if the pause is omitted.

Knead the dough until it has a smooth consistency, without lumps (a minute or two in a mixer, or perhaps three to five minutes by hand). Now flatten and stretch the dough, until it is something like a foot square and something like a half to three quarters of an inch thick.

Sprinkle this square of dough evenly with half of the salt (1/2 Tbsp). Fold the dough over onto itself, so that you have a thin layer of salt between two layers of dough. Flatten this rectangle of dough out, and fold it again. Repeat again, for a total of eight times. You theoretically have a lump of dough with 32 salty layers in it, at this point. Take the dough, and knead it in the conventional manner for a minute or two.

Do the same thing again: stretch the dough into a flat square, sprinkle it with the remaining salt, and fold and stretch, again for a total of eight folds. Again, knead the resulting dough in the conventional manner for a minute or two.

The purpose of this peculiar procedure, which you won't find outlined in any cookbook that I know of, is because salt should be the last thing you add to a bread dough. Many bread recipes have you add the salt to the water, before the flour. This is a mistake. Subjecting the yeast to the salty water will kill a substantial fraction; the surviving yeast will rise rather less vigorously.

Now that you've worked the salt into it, put the dough into a large mixing bowl, covered with a damp cloth, and let it rise in a warm, draft-free place until it has doubled in bulk. This takes something like two or three hours.

Turn the risen dough out onto a lightly floured surface and gently knead it a couple of times. This is called "knocking it down" or "giving it a turn." Return it to the mixing bowl, cover it with the damp cloth, and allow to rise for a while more, forty-five minutes to an hour.

Now it's time to make the loaves. I usually divide this much dough into thirds, and put one portion into a loaf pan for sandwich bread. The other two portions I form into freeform batards. These batards I lay in a couche, a heavily floured flaxen cloth. Let the loaves rise for one more hour.

Preheat the oven to 450ºF. I bake my bread on a baking stone in my oven, and this demands substantial preheating time. When the oven is ready, move the freeform loaves onto a sheet of parchment paper, leaving plenty of room between them for expansion. I take a spray bottle filled with water and mist the loaves, both the freeform and the one in the loaf pan. Then I slash the loaves with a very sharp knife: several diagonal slashes on the batards, and one slash lenghtwise along the top of the pan loaf. Using a peel, I slide the batards onto the baking stone in the oven, and then I place the loaf pan on a wire rack above it.

After a minute, I open the oven and thoroughly spray the loaves with the spray bottle. I do this again at two minutes, four minutes, and ten minutes. I check occasionally to see how done the loaves look. When the crust is thoroughly golden-brown, I take out the batards. This is usually after about twenty-five minutes of baking. I leave the sandwich loaf in for about ten minutes more, until its upper crust is a rich, darker brown (but not burnt).

Allow the loaves to cool on a wire rack.

There is nothing quite like freshly baked bread, still warm from the oven. The very first time I baked bread, twenty years ago, I had no notion of what I was doing, beyond the instructions in the cookbook, and the results were adequately edible ... and the people at the potluck for which I baked it were enthusiastic about it. Even mediocre bread tastes like ambrosia just after it comes out of the oven.

A Note on Ingredients

Flour: I use flour specially prepared for bread-baking. By preference I use King Arthur Bread Flour, but this is sporadically unavailable at my grocer. When I can't get it, I use Gold Medal "Better For Bread" flour. Bread flour is made from a harder wheat with a higher gluten content than all-purpose flour. It also contains traces of barley flour and ascorbic acid, both of which encourage yeast growth and activity.

Water: The microorganisms in sourdough starter are yeast and lactobacilli living in symbiosis. (It's the activity of the lactobacilli that create the sour flavor.) The chlorine in tap water, being intended to sterilize it, can kill the lactobacilli. To prevent this, I use filtered water. As an alternative, you can let tap water sit in an open container for a day so the chlorine can outgas.

Salt: I use sea salt for my baking. You don't have to go overboard with fancy flakes or pyramid-shaped crystals. In fact, it's better to have fine-ground salt so that it dissolves and works into the dough more quickly. If you have a choice between coarse-flaked sea salt and Morton's iodized salt, go for the Morton's. My grocer carries Salina Antica, a reasonably priced Italian import that is finely ground.

Starter: With flour, water, and a little bit of patience, you can conjure a working starter out of the air in your kitchen. That's what I did. My starter has been going for about two years now. You can find instructions on how to do so on pp 31-32 of The Village Baker. The trick is to make a walnut-sized ball of dough with 1/4 cup flour and 2 tbsp filtered water, and leave it in a dish on a shelf or windowsill for a few days. If the exterior is dry and wrinkled, but the interior is sweet-smelling and bubbly, you have succeeded. Peel away the dry rind and mix the remainder with a half-cup of flour and quarter-cup of filtered water, knead it, and let it rise for a day. Refresh it again, with a cup of flour and a half-cup of water, and you're in business. Half of this is your ongoing starter, and the other half can be used to start a batch of bread.

You can also get starter from a friend (I have been known to share mine with people who ask nicely). You can order starters from an online retail outlet, Sourdoughs International, which offers sourdough starter cultures from around the world, including "Original San Francisco" as well as Yukon, France, Russia, Egypt, and other countries.