Country Sourdough Bread
This is the original, timeless Country Sourdough bread recipe. It’s a very delicious and tasty Sourdough Bread recipe you can always fall back to. It’s my favorite sourdough bread to bake!
- Prep Time: 4-6hrs for your Starter to come to peak
- Fermentation Time: 5hr bulk fermentation + 8-10hr cold proof (36F) OR 1-2hr room temp proof
- Cook Time: 20 min with the DO lid on + 20 min with the DO lid off
- Total Time: 22hrs 40 min
- Yield: 1 Sourdough Bread 1x
- Category: Sourdough Baking
- Method: Dutch Oven steam baking
Ingredients
- 400g bread flour
- 100g whole wheat flour
- 360g water (72% hydration)
- 100g sourdough starter (20% starter)
- 10g salt (2% salt)
Instructions
The sourdough bread baking process can be boiled down into 7 Steps:
Step 1 – FEED STARTER – 4-12hrs
- Feed your sourdough starter and use when it’s at peak –basically when it can no longer rise and it starts to crater a little
Step 2 – MIXING – 5-15 min
- In a bowl, mix ingredients together thoroughly until there are no dry clumps
Step 3 – FOLDING – 30 sec. x 2-4 times over the course of 5hrs
- Fold your dough at least 2-4 times in 5 hours, can be spaced out however long you want
Step 4 – SHAPING – 1 min
- After 5hrs, your sourdough dough should’ve risen 1.5x its size and should hold its shape after folding.
- Shape your sourdough dough, place into your proofing basket, and cover your dough
Step 5 – PROOFING
- Option 1 – 8-10hrs – Cold proof your dough in your fridge at 36F (ideal, preferred)
- Option 2 – 1-2hrs – Proof your dough at room temp (70F)
Step 6 – SCORING – 1 min
- Preheat your Dutch Oven in your oven at 485-500F,
- take our your dough out from the fridge,
- flip it onto parchment paper and score it
Step 7 – BAKING – 20 min + 20 min
- Immediately bake in a Dutch Oven with the lid on for 20 min at 485-500F;
- then bake for another 20 min with the Dutch Oven lid off
- wait 1-2hrs before cutting into it
- enjoy! Post pics in the comments, please!
Sourdough Bread Schedule
Here’s an example schedule so you can visualize the timing of events in the tutorial. You are going to feed your starter and make dough on the same day (Saturday) and bake the next day (Sunday).
Saturday
Preparation
9am – Feed your starter
1st rise – Bulk Fermentation
3pm – Mix ingredients
4pm – 1st folding
5:30pm – 2nd folding
7pm – 3rd folding
8pm – Shape dough
8-9pm – Put dough in fridge
2nd rise – Cold Proofing
9pm – Cold proof for 12hrs
Sunday
Baking Day
8:30am – Preheat DO in oven
9am – Score dough
9am – Bake in DO, lid on
9:20am – Bake in DO, lid off
9:40am – Done
Thank you for this recipe. I don’t have a dutch oven and wondering what size would be best of the 5 qt is ok or do I need to get 7 ?
The 5qt is pretty tight, but doable.
Where do you get whole wheat bread flour and which one do you use. I don’t think it’s something I’ve ever seen at my local grocery stores. Where can I find it? Thank you
It’s my preferred, but “whole wheat” flour is fine. Just make sure it’s from Hard Red Wheat Berries (see ingredients list) because this is typically where bread flour comes from.