Home made rustic sourdough

For the last few weeks since my dad retired he has been making sourdough. Perfecting the art and sharing its wonder with our family. He generously gave me some of the starter (the yeast mixture) for the sourdough the other week so that I could make my own. I was to tend to that starter like it was my new born baby. I did for a while, then I stuck it in the fridge and almost forgot about it until the other day, when he messaged me another easier and great way to make the sourdough. The starter came out of cold storage and onto the bench to be fed up for another few days, ready to be made into some rustic, yummy bread.

Here I will share the recipe with you. It comes from a few different sites. I got the recipe for this batch from here, but the method you can watch here at Stone Soup. Jules also has a starter recipe for those who want to be adventurous and bake their own!

Ingredients

487g whole-wheat flour or unbleached bread flour

300g sourdough starter

412g water

1 1/2 teaspoons unrefined seasalt

Method

combine the flour, starter and water and salt in a large bowl and mix together.

Cover the bowl with clingwrap and sit on bench for 8-12 hours.

In the morning it will look like this

In the morning preheat your oven to the highest setting. Mine was 250deg on fan forced.

Put a lidded dish in like this and preheat for 30 minutes.

Put a good amount of flour on a tea towel and scoop out the soft dough. Make sure there is enough flower so that it doesn't stick. Now you must note that you do not knead the dough. All you do is fold up the edges to meet the centre, say about 6-8 times. When you have done that and it is a little ruffled on top, in another tea towel put another generous amount of flour and plop it into that one so that the smooth side is on top. Wrap up and leave for half and hour while the oven is heating.

When the oven has heated and your dish is red hot, take it out and put a little flour on the bottom of the dish. Unwrap your dough and plop it into the dish so that the ruffled side is on top and stick it back in the oven with the lid on for about 30 minutes.

turn the oven down to about 150 and take the lid off. bake for another 15 mins until browned on top and it looks like this!

turn it out onto an wire rack immediately. Serve warm with lashings of butter!

You will love this......