The Best Sourdough Recipes | Sourdough Starter | Sourdough Recipe: Sourdough French

Sourdough Recipe: Sourdough French

Sourdough French bread is one of my staples. As I’ve admitted elsewhere, I’m pretty much baking bread every Saturday morning. To mix it up a bit, I like to make French bread sometimes. Man (and woman) cannot live by sourdough bread alone!)

I make more French bread in the winter — we can demolish a loaf of French with soup.
This is what I’d consider a “budget” recipe as well, since it uses sourdough starter to stretch the yeast’s ability to raise the bread dough. Did that make sense? I mean yeast and starter come together to get this bread up and going.
Here’s the recipe:

As always, make your sourdough batter the night before. Add one and half cups of starter with one cup of flour and one of warm water. Mix and cover overnight.

The next morning put one package of dry yeast into a half cup of warm water and let it proof. Then add the sourdough batter and a tsp of oil. Mix that together.
Then add:
5 cups of flour
1 cup of warm water
2 ts of salt
2Tb of sugar

Mix it until you have a nice springy dough. Knead by hand a few times and then set it in a bowl to rise for an hour. At the end of the hour, check the dough. It should have doubled in size — if it needs extra time that’s OK.

Punch it down and pull it out of the bowl. You will have enough dough for two loaves of French bread. I use a double loaf pan like this one…..

To shape the loaves, think back to 1st grade when you made snakes out of play-doh. That’s how you make French bread loaves. Place them on the pan and let the dough rise for an hour. At the end of the hour carefully make a shallow cut in the top of each loaf.

Place the pan in the oven (preheated to 400 degrees, of course) and before you close the oven door, throw a couple of ice cubes in the bottom of the oven. Bread likes moisture and the ice cubes will make lovely steam for your bread. The stream helps the bread get a wonderful crust. Set your timer for 25 minutes.
The bread should have a nice brown color when it is done. Pull the pan out and put the loaves on a cooling rack. Time yourself to see how long you can resist cracking a loaf open and eating the steaming bread……  Heaven.

Filed Under Budget Cooking, Sourdough | Leave a Comment

Tagged With , , , , ,

Comments

Leave a Reply