Easy Sourdough Bread Recipe For Beginners

Hello! It is exactly 7 30 p.m right now. I have just come out of the shower. My hair is still damp. I'm wearing a robe. Both the girls are asleep right now and this is my time. This is my time to do sourdough bread. So I'm coming to you authentically in the moment and we are going to be talking about an overnight sourdough. This is an easy overnight recipe that I have tweaked and changed multiple times over the last couple of months because when I jumped back into making sourdough, I took a little break when I was at the end of pregnancy and in the early newborn stage. Things just weren't panning out the way that they used to. My sourdough was being really strange and also I needed to create a routine that worked really well for me as a mom. I wanted something that I could do in the evening and bake first thing in the morning and so I'm going to share this recipe with you. This is a great recipe for sourdough beginners. This is for somebody who already has an active starter. This is not the video where I'm going to go into how to create a starter. You can do that multiple ways. You can get an active starter from a friend and then start feeding it which is what I have done here. You can create your own starter or you can buy a starter and then make it active. There's so many different starters on the market to purchase as well. So it's 7 30 p.m here right now. I am starting off with a large bowl. This is my favorite bowl to use for my sourdough. I just think it's beautiful and it's the perfect size. I will be making two loaves tonight. I normally make two loaves. We run out of bread really quickly. We always have guests. We have two guests staying in the cottage right now so I'll be giving them a loaf. For me, I love doubling it because I love giving loaves. If I have an extra one, I'm going to give one to my neighbor or I give it to friends. And for me, if I'm taking that much time to make sourdough, then might as well double the recipe especially when I have this much active starter. But that said, when I first started, I was just making one loaf. So I'm going to give you guys the recipe for one loaf versus two loaves. What you will need. As I said, a big bowl for your sourdough. Some active starter. Flour of your choice. I use a premium flour. Sometimes I use an organic one but I really love this premium flour because the quality of your flour really makes a difference. Filtered water. You want to make sure there's not too much chlorine in the water. I usually like it to be room temperature or a little bit warm. And you'll need salt. And for this recipe, you'll want a scale set to grams. I'm going to put 200 grams of starter in my bowl. If I'm making one loaf, I'm just going to half that. So I'm only going to do 100 grams of starter for one. After I put my starter in, I like to add my water. I'm going to be putting 700 grams of water because I'm doing two loaves. But if you do one loaf, you'll only do 350 grams. After I've added the starter and water, I like to mix those two together. Then I'm going to be adding my flour. I'm going to do a thousand grams of flour for two loaves, but you'll only do 500 grams if you're doing one loaf. Look at this bag of salt. It is so big. I am going to do 20 grams of salt for two loaves, but you'll only need 10 grams of salt if you are doing one loaf. We buy everything in bulk out here. We live out in the countryside. We're only like 20 minutes from town. If you didn't know, if you're new to my channel, if you are new to my channel, by the way, take a moment to make sure that you are subscribed for more content like this. If you are interested in gardening and sourdough in mothering lambs, chickens, children, mothering all sorts of things. Also, this is such simple packaging, but I just love it. The colors are so pretty. I need to refill my marble little salt container. It's completely out. So that's why I brought this out, but we're just going to do 20 grams first of salt. Now I'm going to mix this all up. There's something so soothing and relaxing about making sourdough, especially once I've put the for bed, the house is just so quiet and it's really just become a hobby of mine that really just helps me unwind at the end of the night. I don't do sourdough every night, but I probably do it about three times a week. And it just makes me so happy because every time I bake a new loaf of sourdough, it's completely different from the last. I will say this recipe stays really consistent, which is nice. You want a consistent recipe because you want your sourdough to be good and to expect it to be good. Every time you make it, you are going to mix everything up. And if it's sticky and shaggy like this, that's exactly what you want. You want it to look sticky and shaggy for your first initial mix of all of the ingredients, which is only four ingredients. That's why I love making a really simple sourdough from home. I'm going to let it sit. Now that we have our beautiful shaggy and sticky consistency, I'm going to let this sit for one hour. Then we're going to come back and do a stretch and fold. While I'm waiting that hour, I'm going to refill my salt container, feed my starter again. And then usually this is a time that I'll take a bath in the evening or a shower or whatever. I just jumped on taking a shower because we went on a family hike today and I just felt like I needed to take it before I did anything. Okay. I ended up getting on a call with someone from the Netherlands and it was 8 30 in the morning for them, but like 8 30 at night for me. And we ended up talking till 10. So I have let this sit for far over an hour, but hopefully that doesn't make anything bad. I don't know. I've never done that. So leave it for an hour, but who knows what it will do. The funny thing about it's, I can't believe it's 10 PM. I'm going to be so tired tomorrow. Um, but the funny thing about sourdough is that it's kind of, it's always a surprise. And I don't mean that like every time you make your sourdough loaf, it's different. I did say that earlier though. But what I mean is that it's consistent if you do the recipe the right way, but it is affected by so many things. That's what I'm trying to say. Sourdough is affected by so many things. It's affected by the temperature in your kitchen. It's affected by how long you let it proof. It's affected by what your sourdough starter is doing that day. Like how is it behaving? There's all sorts of things, elements and things in your environment that affect your dough. So I think at the end of the day, me leaving it for a lot longer than I normally do could actually affect it in a positive way. This is how I do a stretch and fold. I grab one edge, pull in, grab the other edge, pull in, grab the other edge, pull in, grab the other edge, pull in. I think of it as a square, even though it is a round circle. And I think of it as having four edges. And then I take my dough and I pull in word like this, inward and under to create the shape of a dough ball like this. And I like to dust flour underneath and over my dough. I don't do too many stretch and folds because then it can just get like sticky and a bit too much. So I am going to go in with this dough ball here and I'm going to throw flour in my bread basket. I have a bunch of flour at the bottom of my bread basket. And I'm going to put my dough ball in there and I'm going to put a towel or these bread baskets that I have come with these little sort of like linen covers. I'm going to put that on there and I've got two. So I'm going to put flour in this one as well. And allow this to proof overnight. This one, I don't know where my wrap is. So I'm actually just going to grab a towel that I have and I'm going to put that over it. And then these two loaves will just sit somewhere semi-warm in my kitchen. But to be honest, it's not that warm in here right now, but we'll see how it goes. And I'm just going to clean up my mess. I will do another stretch and fold in the morning. I'm going to go clean my hands and then finish cleaning the kitchen up. And then I'm going to go to bed and I'm going to wake up in the morning. I'm going to do another stretch and fold. Let it sit for an hour and then we're going to bake it. But I don't have to tell you that. I'll just see you in the morning and we'll do it together. Morning. It's like 7am right now. I'm just looking at my starter. My starter looks really good after feeding it last night. And then let's take a look at my loaves and see how those do. This is my loaf. It definitely rose. So you want it to kind of look like it's like poofy and maybe that it's about doubled in size. There's this one too. Both look good. I'd say this one looks a little bit better. This one's just drier. This has like a really like smooth consistency on it. I'm going to do a stretch and fold. More flour in the bread basket. I'm going to let these sit for one more hour while I have my coffee and then we will bake. It has been one hour. I have preheated the oven to 230 degrees Celsius and 450 degrees Fahrenheit, whichever one you go by. I have my Dutch oven. I took the top off and I put a baking sheet inside. I'm going to grab the loaf that I want to cook first to pull it out very gently, trying to keep its shape as much as possible. Most of the time I just chuck it in here on the baking sheet. I've just put flour on top of my loaf and then I'm going to score it. So I've dusted a good amount of flour on top and then I like to just do a little swiggle like this. Open it up to let some air in. I am going to put the top on and then I'm going to bake it with the top on for 30 minutes. Then I take the top off after the 30 minute mark and I bake it for another 20 minutes with the top off. Don't forget to set a timer. Okay, 30 minutes, top off. Okay friends, the moment of truth. My 20 minute timer just went off. I'm going to put on my mittens and see what's go... Oh, hi beautiful. Oh my beautiful, gorgeous, goodness, beauty. Look at that baby. It's so good. Happy, happy days. Look at that beauty. So gorgeous. I have to leave the house soon so I'm trying to hurry. I'm going to put my next loaf in. All right. So after you bake your sourdough, it's good to leave it for at least 30 minutes to cool because if you try to cut into it too early, this is probably the hardest part is waiting to not cut into it and see what the inside looks like. But waiting 30 minutes is so much better because if you try to cut into early, it will make it more dense than you want it to be. It's still kind of cooking and doing its thing for at least 30 minutes to an hour is probably better. I'm going to put my next loaf in, do the same thing and then I've got two loaves of sourdough. So I hope that this was helpful for you guys. I had somebody message me that tried this recipe because I shared it on Instagram Reels as well and she sent me the pictures of her sourdough and it turned out so beautiful, like better than mine. So I'm really happy to see any of your loaves. Please send them my way because it makes me so happy. This is a recipe that I have spent hours like tweaking and changing to just sort of fit into one, my lifestyle and two, just sourdough that is consistently great and delicious. Happy baking. I wish you all the best of luck in this process and let me know how it goes. Bye. It is much later in the day. Both girls are napping right now. I'm going to cut this open and take a look at it. I gave the other loaf to our guests and I kept this one. I'm not sure what the other one ended up looking like because actually Alex ended up finishing the loaf for me and he's already given it to them. So we have one loaf now. It's really soft, which I love. It's got beautiful holes in it. It's super like gooey, like gooey in a good way. Soft. It's got some fluff to it. It could be fluffier. What is better than fresh sourdough? Salted butter on it. Salted New Zealand butter. This is a fantastic loaf.