How sourdough baking kicked my arse

…and why I’m glad I kept coming back for more. Plus, a tasty cauliflower dinner.

It’s Real Bread Week, a global celebration of proper bread in all its forms, whether it’s made at home or bought from a local baker. A sourdough beauty or made with commercial yeast. Pappy supermarket bread need not apply.

And yes, I know there are times when pre-sliced, cheapo bread is ideal. Like a Sunday morning sausage sandwich, when you want – nay, need – the grease to soak through the bread and coat your fingers as you clasp it, shakily, to your hungover mouth. But this isn’t one of those weeks. This is *activates M&S food advert voice* Real Bread Week.

To celebrate, I thought I’d share my sourdough journey. By which I mean the many ways sourdough kicked my arse as I tried – and often failed – to produce one of those airy masterpieces you see on social media. Please enjoy.

Spoiler alert: I got there in the end

I came late to the sourdough party.

Never one to adopt a trend on time, I made a sourdough starter and began baking with it in late 2021 – almost two years after the rest of the pandemic world. (Sourdough should be flattered; it took me 15 years to get around to watching The Sopranos.)

And boy, was I unprepared for the massive learning curve that is sourdough baking. Even as someone who’d been baking (regular) bread for a decade. The funny thing about sourdough is it’s easy once you get the hang of it – really easy – but until you get the hang of it, it’s infuriating.

Or it was for me, a Leo who generally expects everyone and everything to bend to my iron will. Sourdough saw me and my iron will coming, pushed on its brass knuckles, cracked its neck from side to side like a movie henchman, and said, ‘Come on then, Princess, let’s dance.’

And that’s when sourdough opened up a can of whoop-ass on me.

Because it turns out there are so many ways you can fuck up sourdough bread. It’s nothing like baking with regular commercial yeast, where you generally get perfect, easily repeatable bread.

With sourdough, there are too many variables to grasp – types of flour, hydration level, room temperature, rising time, shaping technique, oven temperature, baking vessel…

So when your loaf comes out looking like a very impractical round brick, it’s really hard to tell which one (or combination) of the variables you got wrong. Is it underproved? Overproved? Was the oven slightly too hot when it went in? Not hot enough? Did you not shape it well enough?

It doesn’t help that our kitchen is either toasty hot or pretty cold, depending on the season and whether the fire’s on. So following someone else’s timings didn’t always help.

I made some hilariously flat loaves. I made underbaked loaves. I made overbaked loaves. I made loaves that had a really tight crumb in one end of the loaf, then a massive hole in the other end. (The pain of cutting into a loaf and finding a crater inside. Indescribable.)

But as a wise man (*cough* Rocky Balboa *cough*) once said. ‘It ain’t about how hard you can hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’

So I took the weekly sourdough beatings and, gradually, got better. I tried different methods, timings and quantities, and found what worked for our schedule and kitchen. (Plus, I learned I could store my starter in the fridge, so it wouldn’t need daily feedings. Life-changing.)

After months of trial and error, doing a lot of reading, and watching many YouTube videos, I was turning out pretty good loaves. Rob, meanwhile, had quietly watched me make loaf after loaf. He’d watched all the YouTube videos with me, and listened to me bore on about hydration.

Then, after seeing me make every sourdough mistake going, he decided to have a go. You can guess what happened next, can’t you? He nailed it – bloody nailed it – first time. The bastard.

Nowadays we both make sourdough most weeks. I’m not saying we’re competitive about it. But I’m not not saying that, if you catch my drift.

Sourdough has ruined all other bread for us. When I’m staying somewhere else, and can’t make sourdough, I’m lost. We’ve even taken a loaf of sourdough on holiday with us. Like a bread puppy.

That sexy crumb shot

After all that, here’s what I’ve learned about sourdough:

I offer these up not as a sourdough expert, just as someone who discovered some useful tricks – and mindset shifts – along the way:

• Even your worst sourdough loaf will taste better than any supermarket bread. Even those loaves that haven’t risen properly, or are a bit dense inside, or have too many holes, or too few holes. They still taste great. Eat and enjoy.

• Mega-holey bread isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The butter slips through your toast.

• Don’t feel bad for making lower hydration loaves. (Higher hydration, or more water = a more open, holey structure and more of that trademark ‘waxy’ texture. A lot of boasting goes on about hydration levels.) When I was struggling, I brought my hydration level down to 60% or 65% while I got used to handling sourdough, and my loaves improved a lot. Nowadays I do 70%, and feel no need to push it higher.

• Sourdough is maths. Get used to it.

• You don’t necessarily need proper bread flour (it’s really expensive here in Bulgaria), but you do need a flour with as much protein as possible. The white flour we buy is 11.9% protein, which is pretty much on par with bread flour, but without the price tag.

• Baking in a preheated cast iron lidded pot (Dutch oven) genuinely makes a difference. More ‘bread spring’. Better crust, too.

• Spraying the dough with water just before it goes into the oven creates a beautiful, blistery, chewy crust.

• Finally, you can get silicon bread mats to help you lift the dough in and out of the pan. I have one, and love it. (It reduces the anxiety of lowering dough into a satanically hot pan by around 90%.) But before I got one, I made an improvised copycat version – replicating the size and shape of a silicon bread mat I saw online and cutting that shape out of a Poundland reusable baking liner. If you don’t mind single-use stuff, you can also just use a sheet of baking paper. Works a treat.

How do you feel about sourdough?

Before we get to this week’s recipe recommendation – which is nothing to do with sourdough – would you mind answering the poll below? I’d love to know whether you appreciate the occasional bit of sourdough chat and recipe, or not. (I’ve made some cracking cakes with sourdough starter. Plus savoury pancakes, sweet pancakes... It’s not just about bread.) So tell me:

Recent lunch: sourdough kimchi pancake

What to eat this week: Sticky sesame-baked cauliflower

We made this very fine cauliflower thing recently from One Pot, Pan, Planet by

Anna Jones

. (If you haven’t got the book, you can find the recipe here.) It’s a delight – cauliflower chunks coated in batter, baked, then slathered in a sticky, sweet, savoury sauce before a final blast in the oven. It’s not as OTT indulgent as it sounds. We had it with salad and felt quite virtuous, actually.

If you're wondering why some of the cauliflower looks suspiciously like broccoli that’s because it is. We added a few stray bits of broccoli that needed using up. Don’t do this unless you’re really desperate to use up broccoli, as those bits weren’t as good. The frilly, florety ends of the broccoli soaked up loads of batter and were a bit dense. Although, to be honest, I quite enjoyed that, in the same way I used to enjoy the squidgier bits around a chip shop battered sausage.

Apologies to Anna for comparing this very nice recipe to a battered sausage from the chippie.

Thank you for being here. Please hit the like button if you enjoyed this piece, as it really helps others find it.