Prepare To Bake Sourdough Bread At Home In Three Simple Steps

Have you suddenly become interested in baking your own sourdough bread at home? The dream of taking warm, crusty loaves freshly baked from your oven, filing you home with the most delicious aroma. If so, you’re not alone! 

But successfully baking sourdough bread at home doesn’t just start in baking your loaf in a hot oven. Success starts before you even mix flour and water to create your dough. So let’s go through three simple but powerful steps you can take to set yourself up for sourdough bread baking success. 

Watch the video below or read on to find out more. 

Step 1: Get the Right Equipment

Before you begin, check you’ve got the basics covered. You don’t need fancy ingredients or equipment, just a few trusty tools to make the process smooth and stress-free: 

• Mixing bowl, large enough for all your dough 
• Dough scraper, to make handling sticky dough much easier 
• Kitchen scales, essential for accurate measurements 
• Measuring jugs, to measure out liquids 
• Banneton or loaf tin, to help your dough hold its shape during rising 
• A clean jar with a lid, perfect for storing your starter 

Think of these as your sourdough starter pack. Once you have it ready, you’ll be well on your way to mixing up sourdough loaves at home. 

Step 2: Stock Up On The Right Ingredients

Sourdough, just like most bread baking, needs only a few simple ingredients. Get the best you can find, organic flours if possible.

• Wholemeal or dark rye flour: This is your sourdough starter’s best friend. Rye naturally carries more wild yeast on the outer shell of the grain, making it ideal for building a strong, bubbly starter.
• Strong white wheat bread flour: One with 11 – 13% protein content (11 – 13g protein per 100g flour, as per the nutritional information on the packet) works well and is a reliable flour to use if you’re just starting out with sourdough bread baking. You’ll get to know how your dough should feel as you knead it and let it rise too. Then, when you’re comfortable with the basics, you can branch out and try out types of flour in your sourodugh bread such as wholemeal wheat flour or spelt flour.
• Salt: Needed to give your bread flavour plus it will strengthen the gluten network in your sourdough bread and support your loaf as it rises.

And of course, don’t forget your sourdough starter itself. You can get my free step-by-step process to creating your own successful rye flour sourdough starter as a thank you when you sign up to my newsletter here.

Step 3: Wake Up Your Starter

One thing to always remember when baking sourdough bread: if your starter isn’t active, your dough will never rise, no matter how much preparation you’ve done. So before you start mixing ingredients, take time to feed your starter fresh water and flour so that the yeast become active again.

You’ll need to give your starter a good few hours, possibly all day, to get back to full activity after feeding. Look for lots of bubbles plus your starter may rise in the bowl. You may sometimes need to do two feeds over a 24 hour period before your starter comes back to life if it’s been stored for a long time.

And if this all sounds life quite a lot of fuss, plus plenty of things to remember to do, don’t panic! In my newly updated Introduction to Sourdough Bread Baking online course, you’ll receive a sourdough bread baking planner to download and use at home, Setting out all the key steps, you’ll be able to plan out each stage of your bake around your schedule with ease.

Ready To Bake Sourdough Bread 

That’s it! With your equipment ready, ingredients purchased and your starter bubbling away, you’re all ready to bake sourdough bread at home. You can begin baking with confidence and perhaps even some excitement for the delicious loaves that you’ll make. 

Want my further help and support to bake more sourdough bread at home? Check out my Introduction to Sourdough Bread Baking online recorded course here. Step-by-step videos guide you through each stage of the process. Plus detailed notes and a recipe to follow at home. Join now and you’ll get ongoing access plus you can bake along at a time to suit you.