How to Make Sourdough Bread (One Loaf Recipe) | Kiersten Hickman (2024)

This update has been a long time coming. Over the past two years, I’ve been perfecting my sourdough bread recipe, and I finally feel like I’ve got it. And OMG, is it a lot easier than the last recipe I shared. Like…so much easier. If you find yourself with some sourdough (or are toying with the idea of growing your own starter), then you are going to want to keep this single loaf sourdough bread recipe in your back pocket. It makes one perfect sourdough loaf, and it’s my go-to recipe for sourdough bread every single week. No joke.

At this point, I can’t really imagine my life without sourdough. I loved the challenge of growing it in early 2020 (pre-pandemic people, call me a trendsetter)—even if the months it took to mature my starter were absolutely excruciating…with so many failed loafs of sourdough along the way.

Now, my baby June (the name I gave my stater, it’s a sourdough thing), has given birth to many sourdough babies that are all around the country. Friends and family collected a little extra sourdough and now have their own starters at home. Some right here in Brooklyn, one in Missouri, one in Florida, one in Connecticut, one in Virginia. It’s fun to spread the sourdough love.

Plus, I’ve grown fond of sourdough discard recipes. When I’m not baking this loaf, I’m making sourdough muffins, crepes, shortcakes, and of course, these delectable sourdough cinnamon rolls with orange glaze.

But the real winner, my friends, is this beautiful loaf of bread.

Ingredients for one sourdough bread loaf

Just four ingredients—easy peasy.

• 500 grams of bread flour
• 330 grams of lukewarm water
• 50 grams of active starter (fed)
• 9 grams of salt

You don’t need a ton of supplies, but if you’re just starting out, here’s a list of supplies I currently use. Alright, let’s bake some bread.

First, whisk together the water and starter. Once whisked, add in the flour and salt. Mix together with a spatula until just combined, making a shaggy dough like how it’s pictured above. Hot tip—do this an hour before you go to bed the night before baking. Trust me.

Cover up your sourdough with plastic wrap and let it sit for 45 minutes. This is a little tip I learned from a friend—it prevents the top of the dough from developing a small crust during the rise.

Next is the stretch and fold technique. As pictured above, you are going to grab a corner of the dough and fold it over on the top. Do this with all four “corners” of the dough (aka only do this four times at different parts of the dough), and it will form into a little ball as such:

Cover up the sourdough with plastic wrap again and let it rise overnight. This process should take 8 to 10 hours—just enough time for you to get in a good night of sleep.

Your dough should look like this! Bubbles on top and fluffy. Remove the plastic wrap and grab yourself a bench scraper.

Remove the dough with the bench scraper or rubber spatula to a cutting board that you pre-floured. Let it rest for five minutes.

Shape the loaf! It was kind of hard for me to picture how I shape it, so here’s a video tutorial I love to follow that will make it easy for you. Cover it again with that plastic wrap and let it sit for 45 minutes. At this point, you’ll also want to preheat your oven to 450 degrees.

After that small second rise, flip the loaf over onto a piece of parchment paper. Using a bread scorer (like this one) draw a little design! This will create those breaking points when the bread rises in the oven. The design you see above is pretty much my go-to right now. It always comes out so beautifully.

Place the parchment paper with the loaf into a dutch oven. Another thing I learned? You don’t have to preheat your dutch oven! Unlike my previous tutorial where I told you to do so, I found out that you don’t actually have to do that in order to create a successful sourdough loaf. Yay for not having to burn your arms placing the bread in!

Cover the dutch oven with the lid and bake for 20 minutes. After, remove the lid and it should look like the above image.

Bake for another 30 minutes. Your bread will become nice and golden brown and crunchy, like this! You’ll probably hear some popping noises from the crust.

Let the bread sit for 1 hour before slicing. I know, I know! Patience, grasshopper. It will be easier to slice if you wait. But I won’t judge if you slice off a small part of the end and eat it with butter and jam right away.

While I do love to enjoy fresh slices of bread, I’ll be honest with you—I don’t finish a whole loaf in just a few days time! Instead, I freeze slices and pop them in the toaster when I want them. So after the bread sits, I slice it all up using my bread saw for perfect-shaped slices, lay them out on a sheet pan, and freeze. Once frozen, I put the slices in a Ziploc bag for storing in the freezer.

And there we have it, my sourdough friends. I hope you like this single sourdough loaf recipe better. I know I do!

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