i like the sourdough conversion of white bread that i’ve made a few times, but since it takes 12 hours, i looked for another version which might be faster. i ended up trying King Arthur Flour’s Rustic Sourdough Bread recipe.
i got a fancy new digital scale for christmas, so you’ll see that featured in posts from now on. it also means that my weight measurements will switch to grams, and since it has a tare function, the weight will be the ingredients alone, not including the container.
the recipe calls for instant yeast but i wanted to try it without, and it did work fine, just took a little longer… which kind of defeated the purpose of looking for a faster recipe. total it took about 8 hours from mixing to baked bread, which is better than the 16 or more the other takes.
- 1 cup “fed” sourdough starter (227g)
- 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 2 1/2 teaspoons salt
- 600g bread flour
combine all the ingredients. i started with the starter and added everything except the flour – adding that last so i could only add as much as necessary. i added about 530g of flour before it came together, then used more during kneading to keep it from sticking.
after kneading, let the dough rise until ripe – the recipe says 90 mins, but that’s with instant yeast – mine took about 4.5 hours.
form the dough into two loaves. the original recipe was for a “rustic” loaf but i decided to make one in a pan. i used the same flatten-then-roll-up method i’ve used before for the pan loaf, and just made a generally loaf-shaped loaf for the other one and put it on some parchment paper to rise and make it easier to transfer to the oven. i let it rise for at least 3 hours, til it was very fluffy, then sprayed the top of each loaf with water, cut some slashes into the top of each loaf, then baked each loaf for about 25-30 mins at 425. for the rustic loaf, i placed the parchment paper on my pizza stone.both loaves baked nicely and tasted very similar to the other bread i’ve made. as you can see below, the rustic one didn’t last long as we ate about 4 slices while it was hot!
