My Very Own Sourdough Bread!

The highly anticipated [by me] inaugural loaf of sourdough has just come out of the oven! Woot, woot! And, get this....it does a little 'snap, crackle, pop' as it cools.

Yep, it's as delicious as it looks, even if I do say so myself! Jimmie agrees that it tastes as good as any San Francisco sourdough we've tried.

It's amazing to think there are only 3 ingredients in this bread: Flour, Water, Salt. That's it.

The starter contains only flour and water. I'm thrilled that I was able to cultivate wild yeast. Here it is before I stirred the bubbles out of it.

I researched many different websites for the best method and no-knead recipe. Most of what I did came from Breadtopia. There are some very helpful videos on that site that actually show the entire process and give tips for caring for your starter.

Combine 3 1/2 cups of flour and 1 1/2 tsp salt in medium mixing bowl.

[I used 1/2 cup wheat flour and 3 cups bread flour.]

Stir the bubbles out of the starter so it deflates.

Measure 1/4 cup of starter.

Pour the starter into 1 1/2 cups purified water.

Stir until dissolved.

Pour water/starter mix into flour/salt mixture.

Combine until dough forms a ball. THAT is a danish dough whisk. Love it. When it gets to tough for the whisk, finish kneading with floured hands and form into a ball. Dough will be sticky.

Cover dough with plastic and let rise at room temperature for 18 hours.

Sourdough is a day-ahead event!

This is what the dough looked like after 9 hours (when I woke up this morning).

9 more hours to go.

Here's the dough after rising at room temperature for 18 hours.

Gently turn the dough out onto a floured surface. It should be VERY sticky, which requires a lot of flower on your hands and sprinkling on the dough to handle and shape.

Carefully spread out (with floured fingers), not using a lot of pressure (maintaining some air in the dough).

Fold into thirds. (A dough scraper comes in very handy, because the dough is so soft and sticky that it is hard to lift with your fingers.)

Then fold in half. Now you have 6 layers of dough. It probably shouldn't have quite that much residual flour on it....I'm sure I'll get better at this with practice!

Cover with plastic and let sit for 15 minutes.
Grease a bowl or proofing basket and sprinkle wheat bran to keep the dough from sticking. Use a dough scraper to carefully lift dough and place into bowl for proofing (not pictured). Gently shape it into a roundish blob. [If you put the seams of the dough up in the bowl, they'll end up on the bottom of your loaf of bread when you invert the bowl onto the baking stone. I'll remember that next time!] Cover with a wet towel and let rise for 1 1/2 - 2 hours. Check at 1 hour and if it looks like it's almost ready, start pre-heating oven and baking stone to 500 degrees (this takes about 30 minutes for me).

Carefully invert bowl so dough falls onto hot baking stone without burning your hands. Spray with a water bottle every minute for the first 5 minutes.

Bake for 30 minutes at 500 degrees.

Then decrease heat to 450 and bake for 15 additional minutes.

Cool on wire rack.

Life will never be the same. Really. I'm so excited about how wonderfully this bread turned out that I've already made a second batch of dough to bake tomorrow and I may or may not be able to sleep tonight. Giddy.

I can't wait to experiment with garlic sourdough, olive bread, jalapeno bread...you get the idea. No more $4 - 5 per loaf. I plan to teach Jimmie how to make it, too....teach a man to fish, right?! He's pretty excited that we could live on bread [using wheat from our food storage] if we had to. ;)