When people ask me about how to make sourdough bread I usually start a 30 minutes monolog. With this recipe I aim for the total opposite. This recipe explains the bare minimum that you need to do to get awesome tasting sourdough bread. It is super easy, does not require kneading or any technique. It is perfect for experimenting with new ingredients and flavors or for whipping out bread fast.

One thing up front. For this recipe you will need a silicon bread baking form Using such will get you awesome tasting bread. Consistency, crust, crumb and looks however will suffer if you compare it to hand shaped loafs. If you never worked with sourdough this is a perfect starting recipe. If you are already advanced you might want to try out other recipes.

I usually despised baking bread in baking forms. However, the last few months I really learned to love it. Being able to bake multiple loafs next to each other without much effort other than mixing the dough can be pretty neat if you not have the time or nerf to bake proper bread.

Ingredients

Base recipe

The amount of ingredients does obviously depend on the size of your silicon bread baking form. Personally I got one that can handle 500-700g of flour, depending on the recipe. Usually I go with 500g flour, just to ensure that the dough cannot spill during fermentation.

• 500g bread flour
• 375g water (75% hydration)
• 10g salt
• 50-75g sourdough starter (for 6-10h fermentation time)
• spices or seeds to taste

Instructions

As we do not shape this dough we can use a pretty high hydration. This makes it pretty easy to mix the dough. Place all ingredients in a bowl and stir until everything is combined. Fill the dough in the baking form and spread it evenly. Let it rest in the closed oven for 6-10 hours. Depending on how this fits your daily routine you can let it rest over night or during the day. If you go for a longer fermentation time you might want to use less sourdough starter (for me 50g for 10h rest and 75g for 6h rest works fine).

Once the time is up, heat up the oven to 200 degrees and bake the bread for about 50 minutes. Note that I usually do not preheat the oven.

If you have multiple baking forms you can make a bunch of loafs. I started to bake three in parallel. Once fully cooled down I cut and froze them. Thawing them in the toaster worked pretty well. It does not compare to fresh baked bread, but it is still better than most bough stuff.

Variations

There are endless possibilities for variations.

The ones in the pictures are:

• Grain Mix Sourdough Bread
• Light Seeds Bread
• Base recipe (from this recipe) with 15g sugar and 20g butter

Last one did get an amazing color due to the butter and tasted a bit like toast bread.

Tips

• If you do experiment, write down what you tried. For the light seeds bread I did not write it down. Took me 5 more tries until I was able to reproduce that taste.