Country Loaf- Beginners’ version!
Total time: 24 hours. Hands on time: 45 minutes.
This beginners’ loaf uses the most commonly available flour- all purpose! It also has a low water content to ease handling and shaping.
You can make this bread with only 4 ingredients: all purpose flour, water, starter and salt.
Country Loaf Recipe (beginner’s version)
Ingredients:400g all purpose flour275g warm water80g fed and active sourdough starter8g salt
Method:
Mixing: Mix all ingredients together to form a shaggy dough, making sure there are no clumps of dried flour left. Cover and let it rest for 30 minutes.
Folds: After the initial rest, give the dough a stretch and fold, forming a ball. Let it rest another 30 minutes and then do a coil fold. Do 3 more folds over the next 2 hours, then let the dough finish bulk fermenting for another 2 hours. The dough has been fermenting for a total of 5 hours. This time will depend on the temperature of your house. Bulk fermentation is over when the dough has roughly doubled in size, has bubbles forming on top, but is still strong and you can still stretch it. If the dough begins to fall apart, shape it immediately and put it in the fridge in the coldest spot. Make a note to shorten bulk fermentation next time. THERE IS NO SPECIFIC AMOUNT OF TIME FOR BULK FERMENTATION! You will learn when the dough is ready to be shaped by practicing and improving your feel for the dough.
Shaping: Once it’s ready to be shaped, use a bit of flour on the surface of the dough to keep it from sticking to your counter and dump it out of the bowl. Gently spread it out to form a square, and fold in the left and right sides of the dough to make a long cylinder like shape. Roll the dough onto itself, heavily flour a kitchen towel lined bowl or a banneton like this one, and put it, seam side up, into the bowl/banneton.
Cold Proof: Put it in the fridge overnight.
Baking: When you are almost ready to bake, preheat a baking vessel (Dutch oven, Challenger Cloche, or Fourneau, there are many options) to 475 for at least 20 minutes. Take the dough out of the fridge and score it (here’s a video showing how), bake it at 475 covered for 20 minutes. Once the 20 minutes are up, lower the oven to 450 and bake an additional 15-20 minutes depending on the desired color.
If you want to optimize your bread’s shelf life, wait until it has completely cooled to cut into it, which takes about 3 hours. If you don’t care and just want to eat warm bread, give it 20-30 minutes and then go ahead and enjoy!
Extra factors to consider:
Rice Flour- rice flour does not absorb into the dough because it is gluten free and will not bond with the water. You can opt to lightly coat your dough in rice flour before putting the dough into the banneton to make sure it doesn’t stick, though this isn’t likely to happen with this recipe because the water content is low.
Autolyse- Autolyse is the process of hydrating the flour before adding the leaven (starter) and salt. You can choose to mix only the flour and water and let it sit for 30 minutes before adding the other ingredients. If you do this by hand, be ready to mix for 5-10 minutes. It will be a workout!
More Water- if you feel your dough was easy to manage and felt stiff, you can always add more water the next time you bake.
Whole Grains- for more nutrition and flavor, you can substitute some of the all purpose flour for whole wheat flour. The dough will ferment faster with whole grains, so go slowly and make sure you know the signs of fermentation before diving into the world of whole grains.
Lame VS Knife- While I don’t necessarily think you have to use a razor blade when scoring dough, I find it makes it easier. Consider investing in a lame like this one to help you score loaves safely. Holding a razor blade is very dangerous without a holder!