How I Became a Sourdough Baker (By Accident)

A friend pushed a jam jar of grey, bubbly paste into my hands about four years ago. “It’s alive,” she said. “Don’t kill it.” I put it in the fridge and ignored it for three weeks, which, as I later learned, is more or less what the starter equivalent of a coma looks like. I revived it, mostly by luck. Now I bake nearly every Saturday, and the neighbours have started dropping hints. If you want to start, here’s what I wish somebody had told me, including why the best bread proofing basket can make a difference.

So what is sourdough, really?

Bread raised by wild yeast and bacteria already floating around in flour, instead of the dried yeast you buy in sachets. That’s it. The tang, the chewy crumb and the blistered crust all come from letting the dough ferment slowly, over many hours.

The thing that does the work is your starter: flour and water that you feed regularly. I think of it as a houseplant that occasionally smells like a gym bag. Some days it doubles in size, other days it just sits there. Neither means something’s wrong.

Starting a starter

Stir 50g flour and 50g water in a jar. Cover it loosely (a lid resting on top is fine) and park it somewhere that stays above 22°C or so. Repeat daily.

Around day two or three, nothing happens and everyone panics. Don’t. Somewhere near day five you’ll see bubbles and get a whiff of something between overripe banana and wet socks. That’s good news.

Before each feeding, throw out most of what’s in the jar and keep a spoonful or two. It feels wasteful, but skip it and you’ll have a litre of starter eating a bag of flour a week.

A handful of wholemeal or rye in the first few days speeds things up. Expect ten days to two weeks. In my cold flat in January it took nearly three.

Gear, and what you can skip

You need a kitchen scale. This isn’t negotiable, and cups will betray you. After that: a big bowl, a bench scraper, a Dutch oven and a razor blade.

Everything else can wait until you’ve baked about twenty loaves. I bought a fancy lame in my first month and used it twice.

Flour, water, salt

Bread flour gives the tallest loaves because of its higher protein. Plain flour works, but the loaf comes out a bit flatter and you’ll need slightly less water. If your tap water smells strongly of chlorine, let a jug sit out overnight or use filtered. Salt goes in at about 2% of the flour weight, so 10g for 500g of flour. Too little and the bread tastes like cardboard. Too much and the rise crawls.

The dough itself

My usual recipe is 500g flour, 375g water, 100g active starter and 10g salt.

Mix everything except the salt and leave it for 30 minutes. Then add the salt with a splash of water, and over the next two hours give it four rounds of stretch and folds: grab one edge, pull it up, fold it over, turn the bowl, repeat. Wet your hands first. It’ll still stick to you, and your first dough will probably look like a crime scene. Mine did.

The long wait

Bulk fermentation takes anywhere from 4 hours in a warm kitchen to 12 in a cold one. Forget the clock and watch the dough. You want it about 50% bigger, domed on top, with a few bubbles at the edges, and wobbly when you tap the bowl.

I once went to bed early and left a batch on the counter. By morning it had turned into soup. Now I usually shape in the evening and proof the loaf in the fridge overnight, which gives a deeper flavour and, better still, means I bake at a civilised hour.

Shaping and baskets

Fold the dough into a loose round, let it rest 20 minutes, then tighten it up into its final shape by dragging it toward you across the counter. That surface tension is what makes the loaf rise upward and not sideways.

A cane proofing basket (the 9–10 inch ones are right for a standard loaf) pulls a little moisture from the surface, which helps scoring, and leaves those pretty spiral rings. Dust it heavily with rice flour. Wheat flour glues itself to the cane. No basket? A bowl with a floured tea towel does the job.

What goes wrong

• Dense crumb with one big tunnel: underproofed. Let it go longer.

• Flat and spreading: overproofed, or the starter was weak.

• Weak starter: feed it 4–6 hours before mixing and use it when it’s at its peak, domed and full of bubbles.

• Cutting too soon: the inside is still setting. Give it at least an hour.

That last one is the hardest.

Baking

Preheat the Dutch oven at 230°C for 45 minutes, which seems like forever. Score the loaf with one decisive slash, about half a centimetre deep. Hesitate and you get a ragged tear.

Bake with the lid on for 20 minutes, then take it off and give it another 20 to 25. Go darker than feels sensible. Pale sourdough tastes of very little. When it comes out, stand there for a minute and listen to the crust crackle as it cools.

When the starter sulks

Sluggish? Move it somewhere warmer and add a spoonful of wholemeal. Smells like nail varnish remover? It’s hungry, so feed it more often. Grey liquid on top is just thirst, and you can stir it in. Fuzzy mould, pink or orange streaks, though, means binning it and starting again. It happens to plenty of people.

Keep a backup jar in the fridge and feed it once a week, and it’ll outlast most of your kitchen appliances.

Final Thoughts: Just Start Baking

Look, the best way to become a sourdough bread maker is to bake bad bread first. Lots of it. Your early loaves will be dense, weird shaped, maybe a bit sour in the wrong way, and that's completely normal. Each one teaches you something the books can't. Get a starter going, weigh your ingredients, pick up a basket, trust your eyes over the clock. Share the loaves, even the ugly ones. Especially the ugly ones. Before long you'll be handing out jars of starter to friends and saying the same thing my friend said to me: good luck.