Sourdough isn’t as hard as so many make it out to be. Yes, it’s a living thing. Yes, it needs your attention much like your children or pets need to be fed daily. If you bake like A LOT, feed it daily! If you only bake once or twice a week, fridge your starter until you need it. It’s that simple. I like simple! Many of you agree with that. So, let me show you this easy artisan sourdough loaf.
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The Sandwich Loaf before the Easy Artisan Sourdough Loaf
But first…
Sourdough masters may disagree with this sourdough amateur writing this blog post but I highly recommend anyone getting their feet wet, or fingers sticky, with sourdough ought to start as simple and easy as possible.
The sourdough sandwich loaf is that. I have two recipes for it.
Because I believe a quick win is important in the art of sourdough, I recommend starting with a sandwich loaf WITH yeast. Yeah, yeah, I know technically now that’s not sourdough bread but it kinda still is. Yeast just speeds up your rise time. Again, for that quick win.
Then you can move on to the same sandwich sourdough loaf with no yeast which means a longer rise time but still tastes delicious and is another win for the novice sourdough baker.
These two before the easy artisan sourdough loaf is my recommendation because the time it takes to invest in an artisan loaf plus the almost guaranteed failure in your first and maybe second loaves equals a recipe for a quitter if you ain’t careful. Bread making of any kind takes experimenting to get good at it.
If you’re ready to exercise your patience and creative skills, let’s go!
The Easy Artisan Sourdough Loaf
I’ve tried quite a few artisan loaf recipes I’ve found online and not a single one has been my favorite yet! Recently I stumbled on a fairly easy one that only uses your starter, flour, water, and salt. Unlike the sandwich loaf that also calls for sugar and butter or an oil.
Here’s how I make this easy artisan sourdough loaf:
Materials:
- kitchen scale
- mixing bowls
- tea towel or plastic wrap
- bread lame or razor blade
- parchment paper
- dutch oven
Ingredients:
100 grams active sourdough starter
350 grams filtered water (well water is fine as is)
500 grams flour (all-purpose or freshly milled or a mix of the two which is my family’s favorite. Freshly milled flour will be slightly tougher to work with as a dough. All-purpose is much stickier.)
5 grams salt like Redmond Real Salt
The Night Before
Measure out your starter, water, flour, and salt. Mix all together in a bowl or use your standing mixer with a dough hook attachment. Once combined, you can then work all the flour into a dough ball. It will be sticky! Do not fear. Just work all the ingredients together into a ball and get as much off of your fingers and palms as possible to add back to the dough ball then wash your hands well.
Let the dough rest in your bowl for 15 minutes covered with a damp tea towel or plastic wrap.
Now is the somewhat tedious part of stretching and folding. You can go on the internet and find methods of doing this. I simply pick a small 3-4 inch section and pull it up gently while stretching it so I can pull it over the center of the dough to rest. Kind of like pulling up and over wrapping paper to wrap a box. Stretch to have some length, then lay that section over the “box” which is the dough’s center.
Then you’ll turn your bowl a quarter turn and do this same stretch and fold or stretch and “cover” (for my method) to this new section. You’ll do this for 4 quarters, 4 sections, then let your dough rest for 30 minutes. You will continue this same song and dance every 30 minutes for about 2-4 hours. Two hours being the bare minimum which yields 4 stretch and folds.
Upon your last stretch and fold of the evening, cover your dough bowl with a damp towel or plastic wrap to let it rise all night.
Yes, even with all this, it’s still the “easy” artisan sourdough loaf. Or the easiest one I’ve found so far!
Commercial Break:
Most sourdough masters have a fancy banneton bread basket they will let their sourdough bulk ferment overnight in but I do not own one of those so I’ve done two things and still had successful bread results.
- place a clean tea towel in the bottom of a mixing bowl and dust it generously with flour before putting your dough ball in the bowl to bulk ferment overnight, or my personal favorite…
- forget about needing to flour your bowl and leave your dough ball overnight in the same bowl you mixed plus stretch and folded in.
Either of these 3 options are fine: banneton basket, tea towel plus flour, or just the same bowl.
The last option will be a bit sticky in the morning removing from the bowl to your floured parchment paper, though. Just a heads up.
The Next Morning:
Preheat your oven to 410 degrees and place your dutch oven with the lid on inside the oven.
With clean hands, gently remove your risen dough ball from the bowl onto floured parchment paper. You can just clean your countertop, flour it, and pour dough onto it but I like to make things as easy as possible. And use less things I need to wash.
Flour the top of your dough ball generously to allow you to manipulate the dough without it sticking to your hands.
Rub the flour into the top of the dough ball then gently and carefully shape the dough into a tight ball, keeping the top smooth. This looks a lot like pushing the dough underneath the ball and turning the dough ball counter clockwise as you do so. The goal is to create a round “boule” loaf.
Here’s a video of that process:
Once your loaf is tight and round, lightly flour the top again and use a scorer if you’re fancy, or just a dedicated razor blade to cut a design into the top of your loaf. This scoring allows your bread to continue to expand like it will during the baking process while adding a decorative or, wait for it… artisan “vibe” to your loaf. If you do not score your loaf, the expansion will still happen but likely result in an explosion inside your loaf and keep your loaf small which will not give you the beautiful and easy artisan sourdough loaf of your dreams.
Bake dat bread:
Carefully remove your dutch oven from the oven and take off the lid. Place dough on its parchment paper inside the dutch oven and replace the lid. Bake bread in the dutch oven in your oven for 30 minutes.
When the timer goes off, remove the dutch oven then its lid and replace the dutch oven back inside your oven to bake bread for 25 more minutes.
Once your loaf is fully baked, remove from the oven and allow it to cool all the way down before slicing. THIS IS IMPORTANT! This cooling allows the inside of your loaf to finish baking properly. Cutting your loaf while hot could result in a gummy dough inside.
I know it’s tough. The aroma in your kitchen is making you drool. You really, really want to slice that loaf. DO NOT DO IT YET.
Cooling can take as long as one hour. Once that time has come, use your best bread cutting knife to carefully slice your bread. The outside is hard and crunchy but the inside is airy and beautifully soft.
The easy artisan sourdough loaf results:
With this easy artisan sourdough loaf recipe, it tastes fantastic! I can tell you that my scoring looks pretty good slash okay before baking but afterwards, it does look like it exploded on the outside and you cannot make out my scored design. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong, perhaps it’s my love of not following directions to a T, perhaps it’s my mixing of flours (all-purpose plus fresh milled).
Regardless, as my 8 year old daughter says “it doesn’t have to look good, mama. It just has to taste good.”
Enjoy your homemade and easy artisan sourdough loaf with butter and homemade jam. And now you can tell all your friends you’re an actual sourdough artisan.
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