Sourdough Country Boule!
I’ve kind of gone down the path of ‘sourdough’ breads lately — and it was inevitable that I would end up making a classic country boule! This recipe is sort of my own take on it, so I’m writing it down here since it was such a simple success.
I really do think that, as far as classic and traditional recipes go… this must have been how people really did it back then. It’s just so easy, no fuss, and reliable. There’s no waste because we are using our starter discard for this recipe!
What got me into sourdough was my desire to start making traditional leib — the Estonian Black Bread that I blogged about earlier! I made my starter from scratch, using flour and water and a bit of buttermilk. I’ve kept two starters because I wasn’t sure if one would work more than the other! I ended up keeping both, as time progressed, and kept one as a 100% rye fed starter, while the other became a nutritious bread flour starter. The rye starter is what I’ve been using for the most part — but I decided to finally give my bread flour starter a go with this easy country boule.
I took some inspiration from a french recipe as well as my success with the estonian recipe. As such, I developed something that made it incredibly easy — so long as you have the patience! It takes a while to come together, but not as long as a lot of sourdough recipes call for! You can start and finish this in one day. The only drawback is you need to keep your starter discard a few days ahead of time. If you only make one loaf every week or two, it’s perfectly on schedule and also not going to cause any stress. It’s really so simple!
Preprep:
Treat your existing starter by feeding it once (or twice, as needed) a day. Sometimes I feed once, sometimes I feed twice! Instead of using or composting your discard, put it in a bowl and leave it out on the counter, covered with saran wrap. Over the next few days, continually add your discard to this bowl, and mix it up a bit. If it is still growing and bubbling with each additional bit of discard you give it, you know it’s still happily eating and surviving. Your discard isn’t dead! Eventually you should have about 300g or 350g of starter discard set aside. It should take a week, if you feed your starter once a day, or half this time if you feed twice a day. This is where we begin to make the loaf.
LEVAIN:
350 g starter discard
50 g starter (so yes, you need to take some from the ‘main’ starter — we want this bit fresh as can be)
550g of bread flour
2 cups of still water
THE DOUGH — PART 1:
Mix the above together, gently, and you should have a nice thick batter texture. Almost like you just did a big new batch of starter! Because technically, that’s what you just did. Now we just cover it and let that wait for a while, I let it sit while I go do my errands for the day and I tended to it again in about 5 1/2 hours.
THE DOUGH — PART 2:
Your levain should be big and frothy. It should have gone from the picture on the left, to the picture on the right! Now that the wild yeast has colonized this massive mix of flour and water, we are ready to add in the rest of the dough. Next, you need:
8 tablespoons of water
20g of sea salt
a few turns of cracked black pepper
450g of whole wheat flour
In a small bowl, mix the water, pepper, and salt together.
Add the flour to the levain.
Add the peppered salt water to the levain.
Mix until it forms a shaggy dough. Then, cover and let sit for half an hour.
When you return to the dough, it should have rested enough that you should be able to knead the ingredients in a little bit more homogeneously. It will be kind of wet and sticky still, so do as much of a kneading job as you can. Then, put it back in the covered bowl, and perform 3-4 sets of turn and folds periodically every half hour or so. Spritz lightly with water after each turn. After about 4 turns, you can probably start to knead it into a pillowy ball. Do so, kneading for around 10 minutes or so, shaping it into a boule and creating surface tension on the top.
Flour a round banneton covered in linen, and place your boule in the banneton seamside up. Cover, and let rise for about 6 hours.
My banneton is apparently kind of small, so it rose way past the point I expected it to, haha.
Once it’s risen so much, we know it’s time to bake! Heat up your oven to 500 F, putting a dutch oven and an empty baking sheet inside to heat up along with it (on separate racks, the dutch oven being on the middle rack while the pan is on the bottom rack). Keep the dutch oven in the oven even after it reaches 500 F. We want the dutch oven to get super hot. That means we heat up the oven for about 20 - 30 minutes more.
Once it’s hot enough, we take our impatient pile of dough, that is now a boule, and we tell it to get ready to bake! Remove the dutch oven carefully, as it is very hot, from the oven. Sprinkle flour in the bottom of the Dutch Oven, or do what I do: have a round piece of baking parchment, and with one hand, cradle the top of your boule. Flip the boule over on to your hand, so that it is no longer in the banneton. Plop that in to the dutch oven seamside down (again carefully, because it is hot). Score as necessary and desired. Spritz with some water. Cover, put in the oven, and bake at 500 F for 20 minutes! When you first put it in the oven, toss a few cups of water onto that piping hot baking sheet as well, just to get some steam in there.
After the first 20 minutes passes, lower oven temperature to 450 F, and bake for another 20 minutes. Remove the lid, and bake for a final 15 minutes.
Take your dutch oven out of the oven, carefully remove your bread, and place it on a wire rack to cool. Wait at least an hour or two before cutting in to it! All done. And all in all, that took more or less 12-14 hours. Pretty easy for a sourdough bread! I’m happy with how this turned out.
Next time I’ll try a similar approach, but with a higher hydration and full bread flour dough.
The best part about this recipe is that even though it doesn’t need a lot of bulk fermentation, it still gets all the fermentation from the discard starter! And it’s just so nice putting that discard to use. No yeast or baking powder or anything needed in this recipe for it to get that nice high rise! This is straight 100% sourdough.
Nägemist!
Andrea
