Use this basic dough recipe as starter for all your upcoming sourdough breads. It is very similar to the standard yeast bread recipe with one major difference. Instead of using industrial yeast, we are using our own sour dough. The bacteria and yeast will create all the gas to make the loaf nice and fluffy.
Using sourdough instead of yeast creates nice sour taste which creates a pleasant taste experience. The sourish taste comes from the bacteria creating lactic acid. Sourdough converts your whole bread into something fully natural. A sourdough bread only contains flour, water and salt. Bread has been baked like this for thousands of years.
As a side effect your bread will become much more resistant to mold. A sourdough bread can still sometimes be eaten 3-4 weeks after the bake. In your sourdough bread bacteria and yeast wage war on each other, blocking each other from taking over the bread. In a yeast bread you do not have bacteria to counteract the yeast. Thus the yeast bread turns inedible much faster.
Overall you can bake every yeast-bread with sourdough instead. You only have to consider that your sourdough is at 100% hydration. Thus you need to adjust the hydration level on the yeast bread you bake to compensate for the added hydration. This does not work the way around though. You can not bake all the sourdough recipes with yeast instead. Some flours such as rye require the sourdough to become bake able. See the picture above for a comparison of how the final sourdough vs. yeast bread looks like.
Other sourdough recipes in the manifesto inherit from this recipe. They override a few sections with custom steps and or ingredients. The process regardless is always the same across all the sourdough breads you will bake. Inspirational ideas are provided as custom recipes in this repository. From a programming perspective this recipe is an abstract class that you can't directly bake. Please see the standard sourdough bread recipe for an actual recipe you can bake.
- 500 grams of all-purpose flour. In Germany type 550. You can also use strong flour but working the dough becomes a little more difficult. The dough will be stickier. Thus for beginners go with all purpose flour.
- 325 grams of water or 65%. Experiment with more hydration as well.
- 200 grams or 40% of sourdough starter at 100% hydration.
- 12 grams of salt or 2% on the net flour amount. Example Calculation: 500 grams of flour plus 200 grams of sourdough starter (which has 100 grams of flour and 100 grams of water). One percent of 500 grams + 100 grams is 6 grams. Two percent are 12 grams.
If you do the math you will end up with 325 grams of water and another 100 grams of water from the sourdough = 425 grams water in total. Then you have 500 grams of flour plus another 100 grams from the sourdough starter. Which means you have a total of 600 grams of flour in your bread. With 425 grams of water you have a ratio of approximately 70% hydration in the dough. This is less than on the simple yeast bread. However since you utilize strong or whole grain flour for your sourdough baking becomes more difficult. The dough is much stickier and harder to handle. Thus the combination of 40% sourdough on the flour creates an excellent bread which is not too hard to handle.
- Take mother dough out of the fridge
- Mix 100 grams from mother dough + 105 grams flour (preferably whole grain) + 105 grams warm water = 310 grams
- Let mix sit for ~ 8 hours (to accelerate process use warmer water)
- Return 100 grams back from the mix to the mother dough (in the fridge)
- In a new, large bowl mix and knead 500 grams of flour with 325 grams of water and 12 grams of salt
- Add the sour dough (~200 grams) to the new bowl
- Knead
- Wait ~4 hours (or longer for a stronger sour flavour) for the gluten to form
- Shape the dough (be gentle to keep air bubles in the dough)
- Preheat oven to 270 degrees Celsius (Add baking stone if you have one)
- Once the oven is heated: Place a baking tray filled with water on the bottom (the steam will help the bread rise). Decrease temperature to 230 degrees Celsius. Insert bread for 25 minutes
- After 25 minutes remove the baking tray with water and bake for another 20 minutes
8 hours before you start the bake remove the mother sour dough from your fridge.
The dough is feeling kind of cold and freezing. Even worse - your dough is hungry! Do you hear the bacteria and yeast asking for food?
Our goal is to make the dough feel nice again. However - bad luck. For the dough, not the whole dough will be fed, only parts of it. Sometimes I feel bad for the other unlucky part that is unlucky, left in the cold and will receive no food. We always feed equal amounts of flour and water to our mother dough just like we did when we initially grew our mother dough.
We need 200 grams of sourdough for the recipe. Since we do not want to use our full mother dough we start feeding parts of the mother dough with new flour. Some of the mother dough is always left in the fridge for the next bake. Also it could be that the feeding goes bad and you have to throw away your newly fed dough. Realistic example - your cat ate the whole sourdough. What now? You have to wait another 7 days to make your next batch of sourdough!
Anyways - 200 grams of sourdough are needed for the bake. We will use 100 grams of our mother sourdough and 100 grams of feeding. Things become a little complex here. Your mother dough is really hungry and will convert approximately 5 percent of the dough into gas. For that reason we will always make 5% more than we actually need. At the same time 100 grams of mother dough need to go back to the fridge. Else we would end up consuming our mother dough until we have none left! So what we need to calculate is 200 grams for the recipe and 100 grams back to mommy. Add another 5 percent because the yeast and bacteria are super hungry.
Step 1: In a large bowl in front of you place 100 grams of mother dough.
Step 2: Add 105 grams of whole grain or strong flour.
Step 3: Add 105 grams of warm water.
You will end up having 310 grams of sourdough starter in front of you, the so called starter dough.
Step 4: Stir everything nicely together. You should end up with a homogeneous dough in front of you.
If you have less than 8 hours until your bake, you can use slightly warmer water. That will re-activate your starter dough faster. However I usually mix everything together the evening before I want to bake. Over night everything is ready.
This is how your starter should look the next morning. Notice all the bubbles that are in the starter. I used rye to feed my starter. But you can use any other strong flour that you have available. I tested all purpose flour but the starter dough turned too sour too fast.
In a new, large bowl mix 500 grams of flour with 325 grams of water and 12 grams of salt. This is our basic dough. Stir it with a spoon for 2 minutes. Let the basic dough rest for an hour after. This step is to have the flour absorb the water. Furthermore the atoms will homogenize and spread evenly throughout the dough. This will already give you basic gluten structures. The gluten structure keeps the gas inside of the dough.
Place the 200 grams starter dough evenly on top of your basic dough. Many sources claim this should be done after the autolysing. However, when baking myself, I sometimes add the starter dough right away and could not notice a significant difference so far. I just follow this best practice and it works. It bothers me a little that I have not fully tested this myself yet. It would be really good to conduct more research here with a couple of A/B tests.
We removed 100 grams of dough from our mother dough in the very beginning. Return the rest of what is left from our starter dough to our mother dough. Place the mother though container in the fridge and cover it afterwards. We will re-use the mother dough on the next bake again. This way people sometimes have a 100 year old sour dough. They always return parts back to their original mother dough.
Now that we mixed everything together it is time to develop the gluten. For that we simply start kneading the dough. Place it in front of you on a lightly floured surface and knead it. You can also simply knead it within the bowl. There is no special kneading technique. Imagine the dough is someone you do not like. You want to squeeze that person out. That's how you do the kneading. Do this for around 10 minutes. If you have a dough kneading machine, use that one instead.
On the left hand side you can see my sour dough fed dough after the initial kneading. On the right hand side I A/B tested a dough with yeast instead.
We will let the dough rest covered in a bowl for around 4 hours. During that time the starter dough's yeast will spread even more throughout the other dough ingredients. You can also prolong this step. The result will be a more sour taste as the bacteria produces more lactic acid. Feel free to experiment on the duration. After 4 hours your dough should already have increased in size. Some bubbles should be seeable. This means the yeast starting njamnjam on the dough and released gas. If the dough did not raise after 4 hours just wait another X hours until this happened. It can happen that your mother dough is not as reactive as mine. There is different yeast and bacteria even across villages next to each other. In Germany villages sometimes trade the sourdough between each other for baking.
You can already see bubbles forming in the dough above. That is how mine looked like after 60 minutes.
After the gluten-forming period we will proceed and shape the dough. Don't worry, the dough will collapse. That is natural. Experiment here with less kneading when shaping so more gas remains within the dough. That way for instance air bubbles will be significantly larger in the final bread.
Follow the steps for shaping exactly (one exception) as described in the basic dough recipe. Flour the surface slightly more as the sourdough is a little more sticky. That will help you a lot with shaping on your initial bakes. Reduce the amount of flour later on. The less flour you add here, the more fluffy your bread becomes. Do not worry too much about this at the start.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Follow the steps of the basic dough. It is the same for your sourdough.
Done!
The above is an implementation of this recipe. It is the most common sourdough bread eaten in Germany