Recipe: Yummy Basic Sourdough Bread

Basic Sourdough Bread. Learn how to make a simple homemade sourdough bread recipe in your very own kitchen. Pain au levain is the classic sourdough loaf found in any European-style artisan bakery and plastered all over your IG feed. With the help of Kristen Dennis, a sourdough expert and popular Instagram baker, I've outlined the process for a simple, medium-hydration dough based on some of her methods.

I don't own a bread machine, so I made mine by hand. This Simple Sourdough Bread recipe takes a little patience to let the dough rise a couple of times before baking it. But, if you were patient enough to get your sourdough starter ready to go, then a few hours is nothing! You can cook Basic Sourdough Bread using 4 ingredients and 10 steps. Here is how you cook that.

Ingredients of Basic Sourdough Bread

1. You need 500 g of bread flour.
2. It's 5 g of salt.
3. You need 50 g of active starter.
4. It's 350 g of warm water.

Plus, it is SO worth it to have freshly baked bread! Stir well until all the flour is. A sourdough starter is a fermented mix of flour and water containing wild yeast and bacteria (lactobacilli). This bread is a true sourdough bread, which means that it does not rely on the addition of any extra yeast.

Basic Sourdough Bread step by step

1. Taking 30g starter from the fridge, let it in room temperature. Add 30g warm water + 30g bread flour. Stir it well and let it rise double in size. When you see alot of bubbles, it’s done. It took me 3 hours in the summer. This is active starter. (50g)..
2. In a mixing bowl, mix warm water with active starter. Add flour and salt. Mix it all together loosely, so that it’s pretty ragged but all the flour and water is mixed. Cover and autolyse 1h..
3. Stretch and fold the dough and bring it into a smooth ball of dough. Literally pick up a handful of dough from one side of the bowl, lift it, stretch and fold it over the rest of the dough to the other side of the bowl; you don’t need to pull it tight. Then turn the bowl and repeat the process, do it about 15-20times maximum, until its a smooth ball. Cover the bowl again and leave it out on the kitchen counter; perform the lifting and folding actions 2 to 4 times after resting 30 minutes..
4. Recover the bowl, and leave it on the counter overnight if in the winter. It took me 6hr in the summer to see it 2.5 bigger in size..
5. Get your banneton out and liberally flour it with rice flour. It needs to be really well floured, all the way up the sides, so that the dough doesn’t stick. Turn down the dough on to the light floured surface and divide in 2 small loaves. Round 2 balls of dough and rest 10’. Covered. Tighten and shape the dough. Place them in banenton..
6. Cover it again with a plastic bag/shower cap, and put it in the fridge for minimum 1 hour, maximum up to 3 hours. I put it in the kitchen counter (double in size after 45 minutes).
7. After this time, preheat the oven to 250oC. No need to heat Dutch oven. Once the oven is up to temperature, line the Dutch oven with a sheet of parchment baking paper. Place the tin over the top of the banneton, then invert it/turn it all over together to turn the dough into the pot. Slash the top of the dough with a a clean razor blade, put the lid on and bake it for 40’. Remove the lid for the last 15 minutes..
8. When done, remove the whole pans from the oven, carefully take the loaves from the pan. Leave the loaves on a rack to cool..
9. Wait AT LEAST an hour before you slice into it. If you cut into the loaf too soon, steam will fill all of those carefully crafted holes and make the bread gummy..
10. Enjoy!.

It depends solely upon the natural yeast in the Starter for leavening. Sourdough breads are made with wild yeasts and bacteria. Three basic ingredients - flour, water, salt - come together in a beautiful symbiotic rhythm to raise the bread naturally, as has been done for thousands of years. Or you can stash your starter in the fridge once it's established and bake from it once a week. This easy sourdough artisan bread recipe is mixed together, kneaded in a stand mixer and left to rise with minimal hands-on time.

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