The night before you plan on baking, measure out all the dry ingredients and check your re-activated sourdough starter. It should be nice and bubbly, and wanting to be fed. Feed the starter with at least ½ cup flour and ½ cup water to ensure it is ready to go for the morning and that you'll have enough.
Day Of Baking - Mixing
Mix all the pre-measured dry ingredients together in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, weigh out the 100 grams of bubbly sourdough starter. Add 375 grams of warm water to the starter and mix it all together. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry, and mix with a wooden spoon until it forms a shaggy, sticky mass. Cover the bowl with a clean linen cloth and let the sourdough sit on the counter for 20 minutes.
Stretching
After twenty minutes, wet your hands, and grabbing one end of the dough lift it up, and stretch/fold the dough over on itself. Repeat this 5-8 times, turning the bowl a quarter turn each time until the dough starts to become smooth.
Fermentation
Once you've stretched and folded the dough, cover the bowl with a clean linen cloth and set it in a location that is approximately 75F - 80F for roughly 3.5 hours.After the first 30 minutes of fermentation, stretch and fold the dough 4 times with wet hands as you did in the last step. Do this a second time after another 30 minutes. Cover the bowl and let the dough finish fermenting.(Note: If your home is cooler then this, the time frame may need to be pushed to 4 or 4.5 hours of fermentation.)
Pre-shaping the dough
Wet your hands to prevent the dough from sticking to your hands, and scoop it out onto a clean countertop. Working quickly, shape it into a rough ball, and let it sit uncovered on the counter for 30 minutes to relax.
Shaping a boule
Lightly flour a clean section of counter. Then flour your hands, and the top of the dough. Turn the dough over by using a bench scraper or a large chefs knife to scoop the dough up and turn it over. Once flipped, fold the bottom edge of the dough up to the middle. Take the sides and fold them inward, then fold the top edge down. Kind of like folding an envelope. Roll the dough over so the 'seam' is down, then gently drag the dough across the counter to create tension across the top of the dough.
Proofing
Gently transfer the shaped boule to a piece of parchment paper and then lift the parchment into a clean bowl with roughly the same diameter of your bread boule. This helps the bread keep its final shape as it proofs, and prevents it from spreading outwards. Cover the bowl and let it proof for about 1.5 - 2 hours, or until double in size.
Baking
As the bread proofs, pre-heat your oven to 450F with the dutch oven and lid inside. Once you are ready to bake, very carefully remove the hot dutch oven from the oven.Dust the shaped boule with flour or score it with a sharp knife. Gently lift the boule out of the proofing bowl using the parchment paper and transfer it to the hot dutch oven.Return the hot Dutch oven to the oven with the lid in place and bake the bread for 30 minutes covered. After 30 minutes remove the lid and bake for another 10 minutes to crisp up the outside.
Remove the baked loaf of sourdough bread and let it cool completly on a wire rack.
Notes
You can watch a video on shaping the bread in the blog post above.
Nutrition
Calories: 1822kcal
Nutrition info is auto-generated. This information is an estimate; if you are on a special diet, please use your own calculations.
Keyword making sourdough bread, sourdough bread recipe