5. Rustic Sourdough Bread Boule Recipe

Stretch and fold your way into a perfect sourdough boule. This rustic sourdough bread recipe, written by Tabitha Alterman, is crusty and full of developed sour flavor. This sourdough bread recipe bakes up in a cast iron pan, and bakes well even in an unpredictable or uneven oven.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Alyssa Warner: This recipe for rustic sourdough bread comes from the December/January 2013 issue of Mother Earth News, and is written by regular writer Tabitha Alterman. This sourdough bowl can be made with white or wheat flour, doubles well, and is easily adaptable for an overnight rise or even frozen for future use.

[00:00:19] If you’re new to sourdough, her article on starter usage and maintenance is the perfect primer to broaden your sourdough horizons. Check it out in the link below. Like most sourdough recipes, this loaf has a long fermentation time and a long rest time, but that time is mostly idle. Additionally, unlike a lot of bread recipes made with commercial yeast, this recipe is not well-suited for being made in a bread machine or stand mixer.

[00:00:43] Your hands are the key. So watch our hands and pay attention to how we gently move and shift the dough for maximum lift. Let’s say you’ve never done sourdough before, and you have your first ripe starter, and you’re ready to bake your bread. [00:01:00] How do you know it’s ready to bake? You do a float test. So here is the ripe, fed sourdough starter that I started about eight hours ago, eight, 10 hours ago.

[00:01:15] And as you can see, it’s really bubbly. Now, I know that this is ready to go, but if you’ve never cooked with sourdough before, a great way to test it is to take a scoop and drop it in water, and if it floats like this, you’re ready to go. And don’t worry if it has been a little long, if it’s been maybe 12, 13 hours and it’s not floating anymore.

[00:01:44] Just feed it another tablespoon or two of flour, give it a stir, let it rest somewhere warm for 30 minutes, and then try again. You’ll be good to go. So we’re gonna go ahead and we’re gonna start our sourdough. Here is our leaven that we tested to make sure [00:02:00] that it has enough gases in it, that it’s matured enough.

[00:02:03] We’re gonna make it in this bowl. Here’s our warm water warmed to about 100 degrees. If it’s a little bit warmer than your body temperature, that’s probably about in the right place. And then our flour. We’re using bread flour. You can also use a mixture of bread and whole wheat or all full wheat if you like.

[00:02:22] But what we’re gonna do is pour our water into our bowl. I’ve reserved some in this little cup to mix with our salt to add later. And then we’re gonna measure out one cup of the leaven

[00:02:47] It is so goopy. That is a nice mature starter there

[00:02:58] Now, since we [00:03:00] started this leaven overnight, this remaining leaven is our new sourdough starter. So you can go ahead and mix this with some water and flour and put it back in your jar for the next time you’re ready. So we’re gonna disperse the starter In the water. We’re gonna use our hands. Always use your hands

[00:03:25] Every sourdough has its own unique mixture of yeasts and bacterias and happy things in there that’s unique to each baker All right. And once that’s dispersed and you have this really milky liquid with no lumps in it, or at least very few lumps, you can take your flour and mix it in a little bit at a time until you have a really shaggy dough[00:04:00]

[00:04:00] It’s okay if you lose some of your flour

[00:04:08] Will get added back in as you cook

[00:04:24] Now we don’t have to worry about having a workable dough at the end of this step. We just wanna make sure that the flour is all wet and has contact with the water And then we’re gonna let it sit for about 20 minutes since we’re using white flour

[00:04:51] And we’ll come back to it and add a little bit of water and the rest of the salt. This period where the [00:05:00] water and the flour rest together before you add salt is called the autolyse Although you might find, if you have the time when you’re cooking, that most doughs benefit from a little bit of time for the flour to get absorbed by the water.

[00:05:19] Although having made this recipe before, this is a very

[00:05:25] This dough is gonna need a little bit of extra water. I can feel that already All right

[00:05:37] So I added about 50 grams extra water, and if it still feels a little tough At the end of the autolyse period after I’ve added in the salt, we’ll add a little more water. We want a very shaggy and slightly sticky dough[00:06:00]

[00:06:11] Okay. I’m gonna go clean this off. We’ll see you in about 20 minutes. So this has been sitting for about 20 minutes, and you can see it’s a lot softer, and there’s a lot more, there’s a lot less, oof, tackiness going on. It’s just a little bit sticky, but it’s not quite so goopy. So now we’re gonna go ahead and add the water.

[00:06:38] This water is what I reserved on the side earlier, and I put one and a half teaspoons, which is what the recipe calls for, of salt

[00:06:49] Whoop. By the way, be forewarned, this is a bit of a scary step in this process. The dough is gonna look like it’s coming apart and that everything is ruined and nothing is good. But it’s okay. Trust the [00:07:00] process. It’ll be fine

[00:07:17] There we go. And now it’s coming apart, and here’s the scary moment where we think the dough is never coming together. All is lost. Just keep going

[00:07:40] Okay, so now we have this very extremely sticky, very shaggy dough, and I know it looks wrong, but this is actually not a bad place for it to be right now. We’re gonna go ahead and start the bulk fermentation process on this loaf, and what that means is every 30 minutes we’re [00:08:00] gonna come back to it and we’re gonna do these things called stretch and folds, and that’s how we’re going to add structure to our dough without really giving it any kneading.

[00:08:09] What’s really nice about this process is that you can have a nice high hydration dough without having to have hands that look like this all the time. We’ll see you in 30 minutes for the first stretch and fold. So this dough has been resting for a little over 30 minutes. You can see it’s still shaggy looking at the top.

[00:08:32] And all we’re going to do is we’re gonna do our first stretch and fold. I’m touching this and it’s really loose right now, so we’re gonna start with what’s called an accordion fold. So I’m gonna work with very wet hands to start. You can have a bowl that you can dip in water if you’d like.

[00:08:49] And I’m going to separate the bread, ooh, from the bowl with my wet hands [00:09:00] And then I’m gonna lift it and I’m gonna stretch it and fold it over itself

[00:09:18] We’re gonna give the bowl a quarter turn, and then we’re gonna do the same thing one more time

[00:09:33] This dough is still really loose, so I’m gonna give it a third accordion fold, and then I’m gonna let it rest for another half hour and come back and see how it’s doing. All right, so it’s been half an hour. We’re gonna do another stretch and fold. You can see the dough has more volume than it did the first time, and it’s not quite as loose and stretchy.

[00:09:52] So we’re gonna go ahead and do a four corner stretch and fold. So we’re gonna go in with wet hands, and you’re gonna, [00:10:00] oof, loosen it from the side of the bowl. It’s really warm in here, so this is going pretty fast. And you’re gonna go in, and you’re gonna grab one corner and pull it over. Give the bowl a quarter turn, grab another corner, and pull it over.

[00:10:21] And we’re gonna do that for all four corners. Now, be gentle with your dough. Don’t let it tear, and try not to disturb the bubbles that have formed- Under the surface. And do the last one.

[00:10:42] Stretch and fold and then we’re gonna keep doing that for the first three hours of the bulk fermentation, and after that we can form the loaf and allow it to proof for two to four hours. So we have our dough after it’s done with its [00:11:00] bulk fermentation. You see it’s billowy and jiggly. It jiggles really nicely.

[00:11:05] So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna make sure that we have wet hands, and we’re gonna turn it out onto this floured surface, and then we’re gonna let it rest for 10 to 20 minutes

[00:11:28] All right. Okay, so we’re gonna let this take a nap for a bit. All right, so we’ve let this sit for about 10 minutes, and now we’re gonna form it into a boule, into a circle, and we’re gonna set it to rest in this prepared proofing basket. We prepared the proofing basket by putting half a cup of flour in it and just turning it until the whole thing was coated so that it won’t stick.[00:12:00]

[00:12:00] So the first thing you wanna do is flour your hands just a bit, and then pat this kind of into a rectangle. And then we’re going to pull each corner around- So that the flower is on the outside, the flower from our surface. And we’re just gonna go in a rectangle

[00:12:30] There we go. And put the seam side on the bottom. And then we’re going to pull this into a taut ball. So what that means is we’re gonna find a place on the counter where it’s not super floured so the dough has somewhere to stick, and then I’m just gonna use the edge of my hand flat, and I’m gonna pull the dough.

[00:12:52] Rotate it and pull the dough

[00:12:58] Most sourdough [00:13:00] makes a pretty loose dough And all of this tightening we do, all of the folding that we do during the bulk ferment Is what we do instead of kneading to give the dough structure

[00:13:19] And when this is taut to your liking

[00:13:29] You can take this and put it on a board for the final proofing stage, or you can put it in one of these guys, which is what we’re gonna do. So turn it over

[00:13:41] messy side up. And then I’m gonna take a little more flour and we’re just gonna sprinkle it over the top and this helps it to not dry out while it proofs for two to four hours. All right. So we’re gonna put this away and we’ll see you in two hours[00:14:00]

[00:14:33] Here is our finished bowl. I bake this off, believe it or not, in a toaster oven. My favorite thing about this recipe is that when you bake it, you put it inside of a cast iron pot. And that cast iron pot really holds and keeps the heat very even, so it doesn’t really matter if you have a low or mid-quality oven.

[00:14:56] You can also do it on a grill. Just remember, when you’re done with your [00:15:00] bulk fermentation, just remember when you’re done with your final proof, turn out your basket very gently and score the top using a serrated knife or a razor. I like to do a simple X like this. But you can get a little crazy with it

[00:15:29] And here’s the bread. This is why we stretch and fold very gently. You can see all these holes

[00:15:40] It’s nice and squishy Can hear it?

[00:15:49] Have fun baking