Easy to make sourdough bread

Sourdough Bread Recipe

1/2 cup active sourdough starter (it has doubled, is bubbly and even may be starting to shrink back)
1 1/4 cup filtered water
1/2-1 TBS honey (optional)
2 tsp salt (I use Kosher, but use what you have)
2- 2 1/2 cups unbleached AP flour, bread flour, wheat flour (again, use what you have. Even if it’s bleached flour, it has worked for me)

Bowl for mixing (some use square container so they can see a rise better)
Stirring instrument (use your fancy flat whisk if you have one)
Clean towel
Round or oblong bowl (or fancy banneton basket)
Dutch oven (or you can “open bake” on a cookie sheet)

In bowl, mix active starter and water until incorporated.
Add in 1 1/2 cups flour and mix well.
Add salt and honey (if using). Mix well.
Add in rest of flour 1/2 cup at a time until shaggy dough forms.
Cover with towel and allow to sit 30 min.
Uncover and stretch dough and fold back over itself all around the bowl or container of choice.
Cover and sit 30 min. (Do this 3 times using the coil fold method on the last 2 or 3).
Dough should be smooth and wetter looking now.
Cover and allow to sit for 6-12 hours at room temp. This is bulk fermentation.
Watch the dough as different environments have different effects on fermentation time.
Dough should double. This is not like a yeast roll doubling. In a bowl, it stretching to fill in bottom area and then slightly rise is considered doubling. (This is why some use a rectangular or see through container so they can mark it and see the growth.)
It will be jiggly and possibly have air bubbles under surface. (If it doesn’t look like this, don’t stress. Bake it anyway. Again, our foremothers didn’t have thermometers to test dough or time to babysit dough and there’s turned out okay.)
Flour your countertop lightly, pour out your dough and stretch to large rectangle. (At this point, add inclusions if you want.)
Fold it down and into a ball.
Work that ball toward you a few times pulling at the bottom and tucking as you move across the countertop.
Place your towel in your bowl. (Or use a flour dusted banneton basket)
Dust your towel lightly with flour and place dough in there.
Cover and allow to sit in refrigerator overnight or up to 3 days. (Or bake right away if you wish)

Bring oven to 450 degrees.
Turn dough onto parchment paper and score the top if you want.
Place parchment and dough in dutch oven (or on sheet pan if doing “open bake” method)
Put ice cube or 2 between parchment and dutch oven side or place small pan of ice cubes in oven if using sheet pan method.
Cover if using dutch oven and place in oven for 30 min. Place sheet pan in oven above pan of ice cubes.
(I place a sheet pan under my dutch oven to reduce a super crusty sourdough base).
After 30 min., take lid off dutch oven. Remove pan of water if you did the “open bake” method.
Reduce heat to 425 and bake 15 min.
Place on cooling rack for an hour to cool.

Sourdough Starter
Get starter from a friend or make your own. There are many tutorials on how to do that. But basically, put 2 Tbs unbleached AP flour in a clean jar and add 2 Tbs filtered water. Mix well (it should look like thick pancake batter). Cover with jar lid flat and screw band on very lightly. Allow to sit 24 hours. The next day, you have about 1/4 cup starter, so add 1/4 cup flour of choice (use white, wheat, rye, etc. – I added different kinds different days to give it something extra) and 1/4 cup water. Cover and let sit 24 hours. Now you can discard the amount down to 1/4 cup and throw the rest away and add 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup water. Repeat this process for 10-14 days throwing the discarded starter away as bad bacteria can be in it and make you sick.
Along about day 14, start saving your discard in a separate jar for recipes using sourdough discard.
Your starter should be bubbling somewhat and growing in your jar. I mark my jar with a dry erase marker, but you can use a rubber band or whatever you have.
When it is doubling consistently (3 days in a row), you can bake with it.
Place your starter in the fridge now between bakes to cut down on chance of mold growth.
When you want to bake, take starter out, feed 1:1:1 ratio (1/4 cup starter to 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup water) or 1:2:2 ratio (1/4 cup starter to 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water). Allow to sit 6-12 hours at room temp covered with lid.
Your starter should be bubbling and ready to use. Whatever is left over from your recipe, add to discard jar or back to starter jar for next time.

Bread is the best.
Comforting, delicious, by itself slathered with butter, or made into a whole new product (think bread pudding), it’s just the best.
And lord help those on low-carb diets who cut bread out. I’ve tried it, it just makes me mad and mean. So I keep eating bread for my own sake and for the happiness of those around me – you’re welcome.
I’m new to sourdough bread. I was taught to make cathead biscuits, yeast rolls, cornbread, etc., but never sourdough because my mom’s family didn’t make it. It was fancy bread to them.
Mom has told me that when her family would go pick cotton in Eastern Arkansas while they waited for their own fields to be ready for a second and third picking, they would be excited to have “fancy bread”. This was good old white bread and the family would have the rare treat of eating this pre-packaged bread while living in whatever cotton-pickin’ town they happened to be in. They’d go to the local store and get bread, peanut butter, and boxed cereals. They thought it was such a treat because these were once-per-year purchases. The rest of the year, they ate regular old home-canned beans, peas, corn, beets, potatoes, and pickles. And the bread they had to eat was freshly baked daily, sweet milk cornbread and fluffy biscuits. I say “had to” because they did not appreciate at the time what they had. They were eating the best and given the best right at home and while they loved their mama’s cooking, it was just ordinary to them.
I don’t know when sourdough first came to Arkansas or when my parents first had it. I’m thinking if their moms had been introduced to this bread made from starter that required such attention, they’d have rejected it quickly. They both had enough on their schedules just helping keep their family’s heads above water.
But as I grew up, Mom would buy a loaf of sourdough from the store from time to time. My dad loves it and so she’d get it for him. I remember there only being a loaf or two in the store. It didn’t occupy a whole shelf like Wonder bread did.
Fast forward to Covid and being at home all the time and people taking up baking and making sourdough. I waited until Covid was well past to see if this ancient bread-making process was just a passing fad. Turns out, it’s ancient and ongoing for a reason. And it’s good.
So here’s the recipe I use for sourdough. I don’t weigh my ingredients as I assume the women and men of yesteryear did not have food scales, fancy flat whisks, banneton baskets, bread thermometers, and specialized scoring tools on the Oregon trail or backwoods kitchens. If anyone else has these things and uses them, more power to you.
I do this whole sourdough thing the way my overworked grandmothers would’ve. I use what I have, eyeball it, and if it turns out less than great, turn it into something else.