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Posted in Recipes

Sour­dough Bread, Round 1

Sourdough bread making L1040571
Lindley Mills Super Sprouted Flour

Nothing is more satis­fy­ing than your own loaf of bread. 


Baking bread is a lot like growing some­thing from seed. It took me nine days to make my first loaf of bread from start to finish. Extrap­o­lated from Tartine’s methods, a master bread maker, and a terri­tory I had yet to enter in the kitchen. Taking on the chal­lenge was a self-initi­a­tion. A passage to some next level adult­hood or culi­nary wizardry. But if this bread failed, then my life is going to hell for sure. The result would be a symbol of the ground I stood on. 

Sourdough Bread 1

After 8 days in, I had only finished my sour­dough starter. A starter is the ferment­ing process that is what makes sour­dough, and it also creates the natural wild yeast. The starter is your every­thing in baking bread, and master bakers have had their starters for a long time and nick­name them. I have been nurtur­ing this starter as if it was a newborn baby, feeding it ( flour and water) every day twice a day, watch­ing it closely as it gets in the fermen­ta­tion process, and becomes filled with wild yeast.

Sourdough starter day5
The sour­dough starter, ready to build. 

On the 9th day, it was finally ready to become bread. At that point, you turn your starter into levain — which is added to flour, water, and salt and then your dough begins. You can find a real step by step which I used from The Perfect Loaf.

My inter­ac­tion with the newly formed dough, was prob­a­bly what intim­i­dated me the most after watch­ing these master bakers, but it went pretty well. I felt in control and under­stood the tech­niques that I had been study­ing for the previ­ous 8 days. Let it rest in the fridge the night before baking. 

Bulk fermentation

That morning, on day 9, I was ready to bake the dough and consid­er­ably nervous about the outcome. I baked two loaves, one came out wet and I knew that the dough was not as strong as the other, plus I used a differ­ent type of oven. The other came our nearly perfect, a sprouted sour­dough with a great a crust that I was lusting over, crumb, and bounds of flavor. I mean to be honest every­one in the family loved it, even the worst critics. 

Sourdough boulle organic

A big part of this project was finding and using the health­i­est ingre­di­ents I could get ahold of and since most sour­doughs don’t use super sprouted flours, I had nothing to use as an example. I sourced an organic super sprouted whole grain from Lindley Mills, a 10 gener­a­tion family owned organic mill in North Carolina. This super sprouted flour is divine and the sour­dough is so deli­cious. I had no gluten sensi­tiv­ity to it either. The bread lasted several days n the kitchen, much longer than other artisan bread I have purchased.