The Easiest Sourdough Bread You’ll Ever Make and Possibly the Best…

This simple sourdough bread recipe is my go-to recipe. It’s the recipe I use when I’m making boules, baguettes, demi baguettes, and more. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to focus on using the recipe for making a boule, or ball loaf. Shaping a boule is either than the other styles, so it makes sense to have that as the first recipe you try too.

Boules are also great because you can use the bread for so many things. It’s what I use for making French toast, sandwiches, and home-made croutons. I had a buttered slice with eggs every morning for almost a year until I made the switch to my breakfast baguette.

Jump to Recipe

A Brief History of This Recipe

I’ve mentioned in other posts and pages that my bread making journey began with pizza and then to loaves. I will forever be grateful for Ken Forkish’s books on baking, The Elements of Pizza and Flour Water Salt Yeast. They helped get me going and showed me how easy it was to make great breads. If you want to learn a little more about the history and science of pizza and bread, I couldn’t recommend those two books more.

Back to the evolution of this recipe. Initially, everything I made used instant yeast and a quicker fermentation. After a few loaves, I graduated to using a poolish, a preferment that is kind of like a levain except that it is started with a small amount of instant yeast. I stuck with that for a while, tinkering with the types of flours I used, the water percentage, and autolyzing or not autolyzing. While I was super happy with the results, I mostly stuck with it because I was too intimidated to move on to sourdough baking.

Eventually, I got over my irrational fear of natural fermentation and made my own starter. After I realized how easy that was, I went through similar iterations mentioned above (i.e., flours, water percentage, and autolyze).

What I Discovered

Messing around with the dough, I discovered a few things, including:

• I prefer a wetter dough, both for the ease of mixing by hand and for the spongier, more custard-like crumb it creates.
• The more whole wheat I put in the dough, the more muted the sourdough flavor. It also minimizes the oven spring, leading to a denser loaf. So, most of the time, I just go with white unbleached King Arthur flour, and I don’t really discriminate between bread and AP.
• Autolyze is a bitch with sourdough. That is, unless you are just throwing in a small amount of the starter in the dough. For those that don’t know, autolyze is a step of hydrating the flour — so just mixing flour and water and leaving out yeast and salt. Since I use a good amount of my water in the levain, it made using an autolyze impractical. Also, when I did it with just the starter, I didn’t notice a difference in the bread. So, with the goal of keeping things simple in mind, I decided to just bag it.

A Simplified Recipe

Once I’d come to the conclusions above, I started to think about how I could make my recipe simple enough that I wouldn’t mess up the math in my head, since using the calculator on your phone is a pain in the ass when you have clumps of wet dough on your hands.

So, what I decided to do was make this dough easy percentages: 80% water and 2% salt. In addition to making a killer loaf with a crumb that I really like, the 80% hydration makes mixing by hand so much easier than if you go to 75% or 70%. In fact, as you’ll see in future recipes, I actually just recommend using a food processor when you drop into the 60’s and below. I made all the percentages whole numbers, so they are easy to scale up too.

As you’ll see, my go-to loaf is 500 grams, which makes all the math super easy and makes the recipe so easy to remember that you don’t have to keep looking back at your phone to figure out what you need to add. It’s also super easy to double, halve, or even modify for a slightly bigger or smaller loaf. Basically, it’s a great beginning recipe that gives you the freedom to play around with and make it your own, as I mention in the Notes section.

Levain Learnings and Proofing Points

From there, I played around with my levain, before deciding that the easiest way to make this bread was by using all of the levain, not just some percentage or odd number, and keeping the numbers the same and easy to remember. That’s how I ended up with a levain that is 50 grams starter and 75 grams of flour and water (an equal split of 100 grams of flour and water, which can easily be subtracted out of any dough recipe, as you will see below).

Next, I messed around with proofing methods to find a fool-proof method that also adds a little more flavor by slowing down the process. I discovered that no matter the temperature of my kitchen or how long I bulk fermented the dough, if I let it proof on the counter for about an hour, until it rose to the top of my proofing basket, and then finished the proofing in the fridge (for anywhere from 10-18 hours), the bread always turned out perfect, with a nice spring and perfectly cooked crust.

Speaking about the crust, I messed around with the baking too. However, I’ll just include my thoughts on baking in the notes, because I think that’s something you should mess around with on your own to find the baking time that yields your favorite loaf.

Now for the Recipe

Now that you’ve read more than enough about how I came to my simple sourdough bread recipe, here it is…