Classic Sourdough Bread

The easiest, most comprehensive and successful sourdough recipe I have found. Great bread!

Followed the instructions for the starter. Brilliant. Then thought before I write a review I’d make sure it worked! It did. Very straightforward and helpful. Big success. Made some for friends who pay about £3:50 a loaf they were delighted with it.

THE best recipe I've found.

I have my own starter but otherwise followed this recipe exactly. The ratios are perfect & the method is foolproof. Easily the best loaf I've baked after previously trying various methods.

First attempt at sour dough bread. I followed your recipe and am very pleased with the result. Your recipe is clear and easy to follow. So much complex information on the Internet and sour dough starters that use a lot of flour. I actually have made 2 starters one using spelt and the other wholemeal flour. I found that weighing the flour and water was more accurate as my spelt starter became quite watery and I ran into problems. However this was rectified and I was able to rescue it. The spelt flour actually weighed lighter than the wholemeal so measurement as opposed to volume only for me was the best option. It was a totally different experience using wholemeal for my second starter am looking forward to baking my next batch. I printed your starter chart and found it helpful. However on day 3 you advice increasing the flour to 2 tablespoons in both the first and second feed which I followed. In the recipe text on the site point 7 states add ONE tablespoon of flour on second feed day 3. I think this perhaps is a typo and should be 2 tablespoons ?? Also did not have a banneton but found using a large Pyrex bowl to shape effective. Once again thank you Dove for great recipes and tips very much appreciated. Never thought I could ever make sourdough.

We have tried a number of sourdough recipes and this was the most successful by far. The first loaf took around 2 and a half days, the second one took a day in total to get through all 3 stages. Really delicious loaf

I already had a starter but used this recipe to make sourdough bread. It's easy and I'm in a good routine with it now. Take sourdough starter out of fridge in the morning, make the levain as it suggested, feed sourdough and put back into fridge. That evening add the rest of the flour, water and salt and do the 100 hundred 'presses', sometimes it's quite a wet dough but that's fine. Put it into an oiled bread tin. Next morning bake it, leave to cool and eat. This recipe gives a nice crusty loaf but soft on the inside.

As a total sourdough newbie this recipe, both for the starter and the bread, was one of the clearest I've found online. I followed the steps to create the starter exactly as outlined, and found I only needed one further 12 hour cycle for the starter to be ready to use. I similarly followed the recipe for the bread very closely and was very pleasantly surprised at how it all worked out. I let one batch of dough sit in the warm for too long, probably over proving it, with the result that it collapsed a bit, but other loaves have been fine. I now let my dough rise over night in the fridge which works well. I really like that the starter recipe uses just one tbl spoon of flour at a per feed. Some recipes suggest much more but the quantities given here resulted in creating a really strong starter that is producing good bread.

I've found with all sourdough recipes that there's a lot of room for interpretation. For this recipe (and this is the first where I've had real success) I used a mother starter that I've made up from reading other blogs, etc. I used that to create my ferment using Dove's Farm white spelt (which was also used to make the mother). I left the ferment for about 12 hours overnight in a relatively cool (18-20 degrees?) kitchen. I then mixed all dough ingredients and kneaded on an unfloured surface (a dough scraper helps here) until it was just smooth. I left this for 5 hours in an oven with its light on and the door ajar to create about 24C, and after each hour, performed four folds to the dough. At the end of the 5 hours, I created a boule by pulling the bread towards me as I rolled it along the surface and then rested on the work surface for 30 minutes. Then I performed the folds again to create tension, left it to sit for a minute to be sure the folds had 'stuck' and tipped it carefully (exposed folds upwards, into a collander lined with a very well-dusted tea towel. After about an hour and 20 minutes I tipped it onto a pizza stone that I had warmed up in an oven from cold to 260C (don't put cold stone into hot oven!). The dough was slashed and spritzed with water first. I then reduced the temperature to 220 for 20 minutes or until it sounded like a drum when the underside was tapped. Folding and shaping techniques were picked up from seriouseats.com's workhorse loaf recipe which is hugely informative and is what I have always used for my yeast-based bread.