- In this video, you will learn how to make the perfect
sourdough bread at home. It has nice oven spring, it features a crisp crust, it's soft on the inside. First of all, I'll be
talking about the tools. And don't worry. We will be using only the
minimum tools you need. My goal here is really to make a recipe that enables everyone, even with a small pocket, to make amazing bread at home. Next up, we'll be talking
about the process. I'll provide you with a full flowchart from start to finish so you know exactly what you have to do step-by-step. Afterwards, I'll be
explaining you the recipe, including all the
ingredients that you need. We'll be doing a deep
dive on the perfect flour for your sourdough bread as well. Afterwards, we will be
talking about kneading, also known as creating dough strength. And this recipe is really for lazy people. You don't have to knead a lot. And, of course, a stand
mixer could be used. Then afterwards, the
main fermentation starts, also known as the bulk fermentation. This can be tricky. Some people ferment for too long, some for too short, but I have the perfect trick that enables you to master this step. Afterwards, we have a big blob of dough. We still need to put that
one into the right shape and that's what we are doing then, the shaping stage. I'll show you how to
shape the perfect dough. Then we will be talking about
the second fermentation, also known as proofing. Once that is finished, we
will be baking our dough and I will be providing
you with several options, including an option where
you don't even need an oven. And number nine, we make our first bread. I'll show you how to
prepare for the next dough and keep shaping sourdough daily. So, these are the tools you need. Ideally, a large metal pot with a lid. That's where our dough will go inside. A relatively large bowl in which you put a kitchen towel or a banneton. If you don't have the linen, you could also just totally
put a kitchen towel inside. A small shot glass or a glass like this. Ideally cylindric shaped like this one. Two trays. Ideally, a sharp razor, light. If you feel it's a bit unsafe
to operate the razor blade, you can also get an
attachment to your razor blade like this one. If you're just getting started, a scale is super helpful too. An oven is useful, but you could also bake
everything inside of a pan. Preferably, you also have a fridge. Now if you don't, don't worry. Oh, I definitely need to clean this up. Now you will need a sourdough
starter for this recipe. If you don't have one, no worries. I'll be linking my recipe right here. And that's the full process
from start to finish. You ready your sourdough
starter around 8 to 12 hours before you want to mix your dough. I typically like to do
this in the evening. Then the next morning, I
mix everything together and I start kneading. This creates dough strength. Afterwards, whenever I see that my dough flattened out quite a lot, that's when I apply a stretch and fold. This is typically once
every two or three hours. Once the dough doubled in size, we will proceed with shaping our dough. Then it's up to you. Either you can bake the dough directly after a short period of room temperature, or you can go to bed and place your dough in the fridge overnight
for up to 24 hours. And lastly, you will bake the dough to make yourself the
perfect sourdough bread. So for a sourdough bread, you just have flour, water, salt, and your starter as ingredients. Nothing else should be put
into a sourdough bread. Bakers always like to use a
formula called baker's math. Baker's math is a really easy way for you to scale up every recipe. That's why I showed you here the same recipe for two breads. You could also be making three or four, as many as you like at the same time. All you do is you increase
the quantity of flour and then calculate the percentages. Usually, it makes things so much easier if you want to scale up
or scale down something. Now, let's quickly talk about how much water you should be using, and then about how much sourdough starter you should be using. Because that's a very
important piece of knowledge that you need in order to succeed
with making bread at home. Now flour is probably the
single most important ingredient that you have in your sourdough dough. And there are two categories of flour. You have the flour that contains gluten, wheat, spelt, for instance; and one that doesn't have as much gluten, rye, emmer, or mother
of all grains, einkorn. For the style of bread that
we are baking in this video, we will be using category one. So you could also be
making this with the spelt, but I'll be using wheat flour. Making a bread out of category two, it's not as fluffy, but it's definitely way easier. You don't have to knead as much, you just homogenize all the ingredients. So if you're a lazy person, which I am, this is actually one of
my favorite bread here, making everything just with plain rye. So simple. I'll be sharing a link in
the description of the video. Now there are different wheat flour types. In the US, you typically have bread flour, all-purpose flour, and cake flour. They're all flours which
are relatively white. So large parts of the
hull have been removed. In Italy, that will be type 0 or type 00. There is a big difference though, the bread flour. In Germany, it's the same. We have type 405 or type 550. That's what you want to
be using for this recipe. But the same difference is there. The difference to bread flour is that bread flour contains more gluten. Check the packaging of your flour. Try to pick a flour which
has a high protein content. It makes baking with
sourdough a lot easier. If you're a chaser of a
whole-wheat sourdough bread, you can totally also get yourself a high gluten whole-wheat flour. That's because I will be
showing you a technique today that allows you to bake with every flour, no matter how strong it is. That's one of the things
that I wanted to recycle from my previous masterclass
to this masterclass. Before, I assumed you would always need to have very good flour. But now with this method,
you'll no longer need to. It's a much more accessible,
much easier method. So how much water should
you be using for your flour? This depends on the flour
that you have at hand. Mostly, the gluten in your
flour is binding the water. Also, if you have a whole-wheat flour, then the bread also binds a lot of water. For a low gluten flour, I recommend something around 60% of water based on the flour. So let's say you are using
one kilogram of flour, you would be using around
600 grams of water. For a medium, so you
have a bit more gluten, that will be something in
the range of 10 to 12%, you can go to 70% water. If you have a high gluten flour, you can go to 80% or even a bit higher. Very important, this is what I missed when
I was starting baking, I would just blindly
follow water suggestions, and my bread dough simply
never came together. But I'll show you the moment we are kneading everything together, what to look out for. By understanding this piece of knowledge, you have already solved a great riddle when making sourdough bread. I wish I knew this directly at the start. So how much starter should you be using to make a sourdough dough? The amount of starter
that you should be using for your dough depends on the
temperature that you have. Generally in summer, I use less starter; and in winter, I use more starter. So for one dough, that's around
10% of starter in summer; and in winter, 20%. And that's because, based on
how much starter we are using, we can control how long making
the dough is going to take. Some recipes call for a
process called autolyse. It's where you just mix flour and water. But you get the same
benefits of this technique by just letting your dough
ferment for a bit longer. A fermentolyse, that's what we are doing. It's much simpler because you don't need to mix your dough two times. Now, if it's very hot where you're living, then you might want to
use even less starter. I'm always aiming for a
main fermentation time of 8 to 12 hours. And with the starter, with
the amount of starter, I can control this. Also, if your starter is very ripe, you can use a bit less starter. If your starter is not that ripe, you can use more starter. But a good rule of thumb is 20% in winter, and 10% in summer. So in this video, we are using
a stiff sourdough starter. And a stiff sourdough starter is definitely a game changer for you. That's because you always have yeast and bacteria in your starter. Now depending on how much
water you have in your starter, you either boost the yeast or you boost the bacteria. The yeast is mostly
creating CO2 and ethanol, and the bacteria is creating the acidity. Now the bacteria is also consuming the ethanol created by the yeast. It's a very interesting symbiosis between all the microorganisms. The most common acids that are produced are lactic acid and acetic acid. They're very important for the flavor of your final bread as well. Now what the bacteria also does is, the bacteria eats the
gluten of your flour. And that means that over time, you will have less and less gluten. Now gluten is also what
holds the dough together. And this means over time, your dough is going to lose
more and more structure. The gluten network becomes softer, which also means the dough
can increase more in size. Now most of the starters are always equal parts of flour and water. That's 100% hydration. But with stiff starter, we have around a starter
of 40 to 50% hydration. And what happens is, you have
a lot more yeast activity. In fact, you can use this starter for every recipe out there, and you can just replace the
yeast with a stiff starter. So after watching this video, you can say goodbye to
a store-bought yeast. Now this starter is really great news because you will have more yeast activity and not so much bacteria that also eats your gluten network. And this, on the other hand,
means that you can use a flour that's not so high in protein content. It doesn't need so much gluten. And this definitely makes this
recipe much more accessible. Even if you're living in a
place where you can afford high quality, expensive flour, no worries. With a stiff starter, you can make the most
amazing sourdough bread. And this has been such
an eye-opening change compared to my previous recipe. Now to make a stiff sourdough starter, all you need to do is you need
to use your regular starter and then give it a couple of feedings with a different hydration. For the flour that you're using, use half the amount of water. Repeat that over a few days, and you will have an amazing
stiff sourdough starter. So this is definitely gonna
be a game changer for you. Are you excited? Because today you are going to be learning how to make an amazing sourdough bread. (gentle music) All the ingredients have been added. And now we are just going to use our hand to stir everything together. (gentle music) Now you could totally be kneading
this in a stand mixer too but I think if you are
just getting started, try making this by hand because it's an eye-opening experience. You will understand much better how the dough should feel like. So I challenge you, try to make your first 10 doughs by hand completely. (lively music) One of the annoying things
about the stiff starter is definitely the mixing part. But it just requires a bit more effort in exchange for having
an even more awesome sourdough bread in the end. (lively music) Note that I'm not really trying to knead. I'm just trying to homogenize everything so that all the ingredients are spread across the dough evenly. Okay, maybe it's just because I'm German, I would never let any dough
go to waste. (chuckling) So this has been mixing for
around two minutes by hand. I don't see large chunks
of starter anymore. This is looking great. And now, because I'm a lazy person, we will be waiting for 10 minutes and that's going to
make all the difference. The dough is going to come
together just by waiting. We could knead like a crazy person now but just by waiting 10 minutes, we get free dough strength, free kneading. Just to show you, check
how this dough is now. This is a sign that you should look for. It tears directly, right? But in 10 minutes we will be back and this is gonna be
a complete difference. Hello, again! Gluten tag, my dough. With slightly wet hands, I am checking the dough now. And see this, exactly what I promised you. You developed this amazing gluten network simply (chuckling) by waiting. This is how the dough
should look like for you. Now if it does not, try adding a bit more flour to the mix, homogenize again, and wait another 10 minutes. This is exactly the consistency that you want to have before proceeding. Now I'm proceeding to knead by hand. All I'm going to do is I'm
going to take the dough and I'm folding it upwards. I'm not doing a slap and
fold something crazy. I don't want to create
a mess in my kitchen. Just like this, for around a minute. And see, I can already lift
the dough with my hand. It's not sticking to the bowl anymore. (lively music) And also note how the dough is resisting when I'm trying to pull it. This is a sign that you have
a very elastic dough now, and that your gluten
network has developed. If you simply can't get this consistency, then you might have the wrong flour. I would suggest to proceed with using a loaf pan for your dough. Just place your dough inside, wait until it has increased a bit in size, and then bake it in your oven. (lively music) Our dough is already looking quite good. I'm gonna give it another
10 minutes of rest and then we'll be back. So now I will be extracting
a tiny piece of the dough. If you have a bench scraper,
sorry, a dough scraper, that's totally what you can use. I will be taking this dough and I will be placing this in this tube. And this tube here, which could also be a shot glass, you have to be a bit careful with this, or another jar, whatever you have, is the trick that will
elevate your sourdough game. I like to have a tiny
thermometer like this. So it's around 21 degrees Celsius. (gentle music) And right now it's very late, almost dinner time in Germany, (chuckling) 11:00 a.m. And I want this dough to grow here. Which I think is gonna happen probably at 9:00 p.m. Wow, I'm so bad at writing. (giggling) Now, again, this depends
on so many factors, like your temperature, how active your sourdough
starter is, and everything. I'm always aiming for a
round fermentation period of 8 to 12 hours. So this has to sit
directly next to my dough. If the temperature in your kitchen changes a lot during the day, this might not work so well because this heats up faster and cools down faster
than your main dough. So keep them close together and you will always be
making the perfect sourdough because you have now created
a master fermentation probe. Bowl cleaned. Now let's transfer our
dough back to the bowl. I am going to be wetting
my hands a little bit, that makes things so much easier. We need to round up the dough because right now it's this mess. I touch it and it sticks to my hands. This is nothing I want. If we make a nice round smooth surface, the dough is going to
be way stickier already. This is a common mistake
I see many people doing. So, at from 45 degree angle, I'm pushing into the dough, and then I'm pulling it over the surface. Note how the center
part here is not moving. You have to be a little bit faster so the dough won't stick. If you have a dough scraper, you will not lose any of
your dough over the surface. But I wanted to show you that you can also do it without tools 'cause nobody should be
required to buy tools to make amazing bread. That's exactly the kind of
dough that you want to have. See, now I'm touching the dough and it's not sticky at all. Try this. This is how your dough
should be at this stage. Now I can just take the dough, I wet my hands again a bit, I take it and I gently move it to the other container where it's going to sit. We will close the lid so
that it doesn't dry out. So around two hours passed, and I see that the dough
flattened out quite a lot. This is always when I
like to give the dough a stretch and fold. This gives the dough some
additional dough strength, which means it will hold
better together in the oven. And you will have more oven spring. With wetted hands, I'm
just releasing the dough a little bit from the bowl. And then I just go into the dough, I lift it upwards, and I fold it over. See, not sticking to my hands. If it starts to stick, just use a bit more water. One more time from the other side, and now from the other sides as well. Good-looking dough. See you again soon. Good evening! Our sample has reached
the desired size increase and it seems like I'm
actually getting (chuckling) a bit of a cold. (gentle music) The dough looks really nice. Please check out those pockets of air, this is exactly what you want to have. These are the signs that your fermentation is really perfect. Now we need to proceed
and shape the dough. And for this, I'm just
going to be sprinkling some flour on our dough. I'm going to be using
a banneton like this, but you could also just use a bowl with a kitchen towel inside. That would totally work too. For bannetons, I like to use some which already have a linen inside. That makes things a lot easier. So let's flip over the container and hopefully the dough comes right out. (gentle music) We will be putting just a little
bit more flour everywhere, below the edges of the dough. Now this side here is very sticky. And for shaping, we are
gluing the dough together. I will take the one side
and fold it into the middle. I'm gently removing some
of the excess flour. Now we repeat the same
thing from the other side, gluing our dough together. (lively music) Note how the dough
already holds its shape. With floured hands, I'm going to the top of the dough now. And we will start to roll it in. (gentle music) I put my thumbs here. And I start to roll the dough over. Perfect. That's our shaped dough. The rest of the excess flour, I'm using to give the
dough a good rub here. This way, the dough won't
stick to the banneton or your kitchen towel. (gentle music) Now I gently lift the dough and put it into the banneton. I sprinkle some of the rest
of the flour here on top. And that's it, we shaped our dough. Now the technique I showed you, it's great for making one single dough. If you wanted to make a larger bulk dough, then you would need to, before shaping, divide the dough into smaller pieces and then give your dough
a bit of a preshape. Wait 15 minutes and then proceed with the shaping. I think this technique I
showed you today is very good. It's gentle on the dough and it's perfect for
everything you do at home. Of course, there are other techniques which are a bit more efficient, but they might also be more challenging. I'll cover this with
the kitchen towel now, and then this dough goes
into the fridge overnight. This sample, I will now be feeding again. This is going to be my
next sourdough starter for tomorrow morning. If you don't want to use it now, you could also fry this
in a pan with a bit of oil or you could store this in your discard starter jar in the fridge. Now for proofing, you
have several options. Do you want to bake in the
next one to four hours? In my case, it has been
quite late already. That's why that's no option for me. I'm going to place the
dough in the fridge. In the fridge, your
dough is going to be good for around 8 to 24 hours. So then the next day, all you do then is you take your dough out of the fridge and you directly bake it. You don't let it come to
room temperature first. Directly out of the fridge,
it's going to be baked. If you want to bake
the dough the same day, we will be waiting 30 minutes and then we will poke the dough. Is the dent still
visible one minute later? If it is, we will be placing our dough in the freezer for 30 minutes and we will start preheating our oven. If not, we will wait another 30 minutes and repeat the same thing. This is called the Finger Poke Test. The freezing helps to
make the following scoring quite a lot easier. And then we will be baking the dough. Are you excited already? Because now you are about
to bake your sourdough bread and I will be showing you
three different options that you can choose from. You can make a regular bread, which is what we are making in this video. Or you could also be
making some bread rolls now out of your dough, because bread rolls are
the same as a bread, just in a different shape. And to do bread rolls, it's so simple. All you do is you take a knife
or you take a dough scraper and you chop your dough
into smaller pieces. And then you just bake them in the oven just the same way we are
making the main bread. Very delicious. We like to eat this in Germany
on Sunday for instance. And (speaking German word)
is a very hard German word. Try it, please try it.
(speaking German word) Actually, it's not just
named (speaking German word). There are so many different words for (speaking German
word) all across Germany. The last option, a naan
bread or a tortilla, you could be doing exactly the same now. All you do is, you cut your
(speaking German word), and then afterwards, you push
that down just a little bit. It's not gonna be perfectly round but still it will be delicious. This way, you can bake
bread without an oven. Just throw that into a pan and you will have amazing flat-bread. Perfect also when you want to
do a barbecue, for instance. So, these are the options, but we will be focusing on this method in this video for now. Steam is the single most
important ingredient to make amazing bread in your home oven. Now the method that I'm showing you here, it's a very simple method
that almost everybody can do if you have an oven. All you need is two trays to make the perfect bread pretty much. So, you have one tray here at the bottom. This tray will be preheated, and you have another tray here at the top. Here ideally, you have a bowl. It should be something that can withstand temperature changes. Maybe something out of
steel or a cast iron. You will be pouring boiling water in here just before the bake. So this is preheated, this is also preheated. Once we are placing our
dough inside of the oven, we will be adding this tray here on top. And this sort of simulates the Dutch oven. The water starts to evaporate and it's going to circle in here. This keeps the environment nice and moist. No crust is going to form directly, which means our dough still
has room to expand in the oven. This is very, very crucial. So the first stage of the baking process, the first 30 minutes, are just to allow your dough to rise and reach the core
temperature that you want. Now once the core temperature
reaches 92 degrees Celsius, you can measure that with the thermometer and in my case that's always
after around 30 minutes, you will be removing the
source of steam from the oven. And then afterwards, for
the last stage of the bake, that can be 10 minutes, can be 20 minutes, can be 30 minutes, depending on how thick and
dark you like the crust. Actually, some people don't
even do the second stage because they just want to
have a super soft bread. Now what you could also of course do is, you could get yourself
just a large metal pot and place this on top, if
you don't have the trays. I actually tried this before
with an IKEA glass bowl. You have to be very careful
though, it might shatter. You could be using pretty much everything to create this steamy environment. The idea is always the same. If you have a Dutch oven or if you have just a steel pot on top, the water from the dough
is going to evaporate and it's going to circle
inside all the time, keeping the surface nice and moist. Now if you're the kind of person that only has a oven with a fan where you can turn off the fan, then this option with a
steel pot or a cast iron is going to be the best option for you. In case you can turn off the fan, then this method that I'm showing you here is going to perfectly work. Last note, don't go too hot in your oven. If you go too hot, you
form a crust too quickly, preventing your dough from rising. The ideal temperature in my
case has been around 230, sorry for my German, 230 degrees Celsius. This tray here is not preheated. I will just add it later on. And it pretty much works like this, steam goes up, like I showed you, will be trapped below, perfect conditions. Now, if you have a pizza stone, then you can also just
place a pizza stone here rather than this tray. With the pizza stone, you should be getting a
little bit more oven spring. Your bread is gonna rise more in the oven because the stone transfers
the heat faster to the dough. More water starts to evaporate right away. But this is definitely not required. You can also totally just bake on a tray. With the stone or with a Dutch oven, your bread might be better, 1 or 2%. Gluten morgen! Our dough has been sitting in the fridge and it's ready to be baked. Now I'm going to be baking on my stone but you could also totally be just baking on a tray like this. My stone is currently being
preheated in the oven. Now I'll be using some parchment paper but if you don't like that, you could also just be sprinkling some semolina flour here on top. But parchment paper just
makes it a little bit easier. I'll flip over the dough carefully like this. Dough comes nicely out. Good sign that everything is right. If it is stuck, chances are that you have
fermented for too long. Now we need to give our
dough a tiny incision. We'll be using a razor blade. You can get a handle like this, but razor blade like
this also totally works. Let me show you exactly how
to score, it's not that easy. I'll explain everything you
need to know on my whiteboard. This is something that
I commonly got wrong when beginning baking sourdough bread. So, this is our dough, and we want to give it a tiny incision at around the 45 degree angle. We don't want to do the
incision here in the center, a tiny bit off to the right, around one to two centimeters off. Now the 45 degree angle of course changes depending on where you score the dough. So here at this place, you have to hold your blade
at almost a horizontal angle. By doing this, you are going to get that beautiful open spring and a nice ear that adds this extra layer of crispness to
your sourdough bread. Sourdough bread. All right, so let's score our dough then, almost as flat as I can. I'll place my hand here on the dough. Then I'll try to, with one quick movement, go through the dough. (lively music) That's it. Now, here I didn't properly cut yet, so I'm just gonna be fixing that. This just takes a few
attempts to get right. This is called functional scoring. Now I'll be adding a small pattern here. This is decorative scoring. (lively music) I like to give the dough a little bit of a spritz with water. It's also optional. I just think, if your oven is quite hot, it helps with giving a little
bit more steam to your dough. Which is perfect because you don't want the crust to form here. You want your dough to
really nicely expand. (lively music) All right, let's load our
dough in the oven now. Now this is where the
parchment paper really shines, makes it so easy to transfer the dough. Now this tray into the oven, and then our dough, the water. Now after around 30 minutes, I will be removing the top tray here and also the rocks here with the water. And tada! The final bread. It's looking really nice, beautiful ear here. Some blisters. This pattern looks very nice. From the bottom, we have a bit of a crust. I think this is a really great bread. Personally, some improvement areas. Probably during shaping,
what you can do is, you can tuck together
the dough a little bit so it won't look like this on the edge. Same here. From the bottom, if you use a
Dutch oven made out of iron, the crust would be a
little bit thicker here. Or I could have removed the stone and just baked it on a rack. But overall, I didn't want to
complicate things too much. There's always room for improvement. But now, let's slice this open and see the crumb structure. It sounds a little bit like a psychopath. Let's slice this open and see the crumb structure. (laughing) One more note, I baked this
for another 20 minutes. So total time in the oven
has been around 15 minutes. 50, not 15. 50! And depending on how
long you bake in the end, you can control how
dark you like the bread. I like this color. Every different color
provides additional flavor. But if you don't like it too dark, you can definitely bake it way less. This depends on your personal preference. (knife scrunching) (lively music) Ahh. Beautiful! To me, this is the
perfect crumb structure. It's open, it's airy. It's not too open. I can put my jam on top of it. We have this nice bunny shape here. This looks really great. Now let's give this a shot, if this actually also tastes great. So, you can take a slice like this, but sometimes if I know
I'm gonna inhale the bread, I also just like to
take a slice like this. (knife scrunching) (gentle music) Ahh, this looks so good. (chuckling) (Hendrik crunching) Hmm, hm-mm. Wow! It's crisp. It's soft. It has a slight acidity, this tang. It's mild, it's not too strong. This definitely is the
perfect sourdough bread. I'm gonna finish all of
this now. (chuckling) So now you just made your first bread, but chances are, it might not have exactly worked out the way you want it. Here are a couple of
different crumb structures I wanted to show you so that you can debug what might have gone wrong on your bread. If your bread went perfect, congratulations, well done! So this to me is the perfect crumb. You have different pockets of air spread all across evenly
throughout the bread, and your bread has
nicely risen in the oven. Now under-fermented or under-proofed, I prefer to use the term under-fermented, is when you have very, very large gigantic pockets of air inside of your dough. It's almost like a
flat-bread that you made without any yeast. The water evaporated,
creating super pockets. You have to either make
your sourdough starter a little bit more active, or you have to ferment for
a longer period of time. If you have several pockets of air here, very close to the crust, larger ones, very likely you have baked
at a too hot temperature. The crust formed too quickly,
your dough couldn't expand. That's how the pockets are being created. And lastly, if your
dough is relatively flat, but you have pockets
everywhere, tiny pockets, it's a sign that you might have fermented for a bit too long. Still this bread is probably going to be super, super, super delicious. It might not look as beautiful, but still, the longer you ferment, the more flavor you are also creating. By the way, did you know that you can also head to my Bread Code merch store and buy some awesome t-shirts like this? The Bread Code University shirt, one of my favorites. Also thank you to all
the monthly supporters. You make this channel possible. (gentle music) (Hendrik laughing)
