Sourdough is delicious. While though the individual steps are not very time-consuming, many guides assume that you spend a lot of time at home. This is not the case for me, I have tried to optimize the process of sour dough to limit the time I have to be present. Note that the goal is not to limit the total time, but the time I have to be actively present.

Sourdough can be fickle. Don’t take anything here as gospel, your starter/kitchen/flour/water might behave differently.

There are two main parts to sourdough: feeding and baking.

Feeding

You need to ensure your starter stays alive. I keep my starter in the fridge and feed it once per week.

1. Take a fresh glass and add:

• 50g old starter
• 60g water
• 50g whole wheat flour

2. Mix and let it sit at room temperature for about 12 hours (e.g. overnight)
3. Put back in the fridge until next week

Some notes:

• You will usually have more than 50g of old starter. I usually discard the excess, but there are ways to use it, e.g. in pancakes.
• Many guides recommend doubling the amounts I state, to ensure reliabilty. I scale this down to reduce the amount of waste.
• I use whole wheat flour, but there are other options (including mixing different flours):
  • Regular wheat flour: is probably the easiest because it has more gluten, but is considered a bit less healthy (and I find it less tasty)
  • Rye flour: Rye has no gluten which makes it very sticky, I do not like this.
  • Spelt flour: I didn’t like the smell of this when used for feeding, but I do use it for baking.

Baking

Creating a bread takes two slots of active presence. One to prepare the dough and let it ferment at room temperature, one to actually bake the bread. In between, the dough ferments in the fridge.

Ideally, your starter should be active when you bake, so 6-12 hours after feeding (when you mix it, not after putting it back in the fridge). However, I have found that everything will work out fine if you fed a couple of days before. You will then want to lengthen the levain step, to give the starter more time to wake up.

1. Levain

The goal of this step is get the starter really active and ready for baking, and also get is used to the flour we want to bake with (the bacteria and yeasts in the starter will get used to the flour they are fed with).

• In a bowl, mix:
  • 50g starter
  • 50g water
  • 50g flour (half whole wheat, half spelt for me)
• Wait for one hour

Ideally you do not wait for an hour, but until the levain is active. You can check this by the “float test”: put a small amount of the levain in a glass of water. If it floats, it’s ready, if it sinks, it’s not. I usually do not want to be this flexibel. I just wait for an hour (or longer if my starter was not just feed).

2. Teig starten / Autolyse

Now we create the actual dough

• Add to the levain and mix until just combined:
  • 400g Water
  • 500g flour (again, half whole wheat, half spelt for me)
• Wait for an hour

Ingredients are usually given in baker’s percentage, which means that they are a percentage of the flour weight, not of the total weight. So 400g water and 500g flour means our dough has 80% hydration. The higher the hydration, the fluffier the bread, but also the more difficult to handle the dough. You will have to experiment with this to find what works for you.

3. Salt and additional ingredients

• Work into the dough
  • 8g Salt
  • Other additions like nuts

8g of salt is 1-2% of the flour weight. You do not want to add salt immediately, because it can inhibit the fermentation. But you do want to add it, both for taste and because it gives some structure to the dough.

I use the following strategy to work the salt into the dough: wet one hand and use it to grab the dough in the middle, then squeeze your hand together. This will split the dough in half in the bowl on each side of your hand. Turn the bowl 90 degrees and repeat, until everything is well mixed and the dough becomes a bit firmer.

4. Folding and first fermentation

• For 1-2 hours, fold the dough every 20 min:
  • Wet your hand
  • Grab one side of the dough and pull it up
  • Lay it over the rest of the dough, folding it in half
  • Turn the bowl 90 degrees, grab the next side and repeat
  • Repeat until the dough becomes firm and can no longer be easily pulled up, 4-8 times
• Let the dough ferment at room temperature for another 1-2 hours

The goal here is to support the development of gluten. Gluten is a network of proteins that gives bread its structure. Fermantation also helps gluten development. If you want to check whether the gluten is sufficiently developed, you can do the “window test”. Take a small piece of dough and try to stretch it out thinly. If it stretches without tearing and you can see light through it, the gluten is well developed. If it tears easily, it needs more folding or fermentation time. See also this video.

Don’t worry about this too much though! I often am lazy and do not fold anywhere near this much, and do not always have great gluten development before I put the dough in the fridge, but gluten will continue to develop in the fridge, and I still get good bread.

5. Second fermentation

• Put the dough in the fridge for 24-48h

Not that I do not do any shaping of the dough before putting it in the fridge. I just put the bowl in the fridge and do the shaping right before baking.

The timing of the first and second fermentation is somewhat flexibel, but you can over- and underferment the dough. You will need to experiment with the timing to find what works for you. Some of my rules of thumb are:

• If the starter was not very active, you can extend the timings
• In summer, you need shorter times than in winter.
• If the dough does not rise well in the oven, you probably overfermented it.

6. Shaping

• Preheat the oven as hot as it goes (for me 250C). Wait until it is hot.
• Put some flour on the work surface
• Wet your hands
• Shape the dough:
  • Grab one side of the dough and lay it over the rest, as if you were folding it.
  • Grab the opposite side (which now consists of the two original edges on top of each other) and do the same.
  • Roll the dough up from the bottom
  • Fold the ugly sides under the dough and adjust until it looks good
• Put the shaped dough in a cast iron pot with a lid
• Make some cuts on top of the dough

The goal when forming is to make it pretty, but also to get some surface tension in the dough.

There are many videos about shaping, I am not very good at it. Your break will still be tasty!

You need to make cuts on top of the dough, otherwise the bread will break in an uncontrolled way while rising. There are fancy tools for this, but I just use a pair of scissors to make three (halfway deep) cuts, or a wavy knife (e.g. bread knife) to make one or two cuts over the whole length.

7. Baking

• Bake for 30 min with the lid on, then 20 min with the lid off.

The lid ensures that there is steam around the bread, which allows it to rise without the crust hardening too early. After 30 min, the bread should be well risen and you can take off the lid to let the crust harden.

Your oven and pot and such may require different timings. If your bread has not risen yet, try leaving the lid on for longer. To test whether the bread is done, you can tap it. If it sounds hollow, it’s done.

Let your break cool for a bit before cutting into it, otherwise it will tear when cutting.