Dynamic Sourdough Bread Recipe

For the past 3+ years, we've been exploring different ways to make a « European style, crusty loaf of bread with an airy, open crumb ». We've baked hundreds of loaves, collecting data and learning with each success (and failure) along the way.

To take the place of walking down the street to a local boulangerie, our home-baked version needs to be fresh, tasty, nutritious, cost-effective, time-effecient, and flexible (using what's on hand, adjusted to the preference of whoever will eat it and when).

More home cooks are baking sourdough than ever before, and there are a ton of resources out there now to help people get started. But as enticing as the loaves may look in every bread book and blog post, we quickly realized the devil is in the details (read: time/temperature management) to actually achieve comparable results. So we began keeping track of everything we did, dialing in those parameters one by one.

After much exprimentation, we've figured out what seems to work well for an American home oven, combining the best parts of every method we tried:

• long, room-temperature fermentation from Respectus Panis
• French sourdough techniques from Crust
• the "stretch and fold" method from Flour Water Salt Yeast
• ingredient ratios and variations from The Larousse Book of Bread
• technical details and explanations The Bread Baker's Apprentice
• proofing and baking methods from Tartine Bread
• experience and lessons from bakes on The Fresh Loaf

We also found that the format of recipes can be a major hurdle to understanding how good bread is made. Standard cookbooks present each recipe as a stand-alone guide (making it challenging to understand holistically what can be changed and how), while professional baking references assume the knowledge and intuition of a trained baker to take a base recipe and adjust it for the desired end product (in addition to commercial baking tools, like high-powered dough mixers and steam-injected ovens).

Additionally, there are lots of dependencies between ingredients, ratios, processes, and timing that are ideally kept in balance with one another.

So here's our take: a dynamic recipe for sourdough bread that allows for variations depending on ingredients, baking method, and prefernces, based on years of experimentation. It's a work-in-progress that we'll update as we continute baking and learning.

Bon appétit!