No knead, no fuss, overnight sourdough bread

Hello baby.

There are a lot of sourdough recipes out there but this one is mine, cobbled together, and tested over and over to yield the most success I've had baking this notoriously demanding bread style. I love being rewarded with a gorgeous loaf made with little labor. No more waking up in the middle of the night to fold, or really worrying too much about the timing of things. This is as simple as sourdough gets, imo.

You need an established and fed starter, and though I've made my own, I let it die in the fall. The one I'm using now was kindly given to us by G's mom and transported all the way from the west coast to the east coast to become bread! She used the recipe from King Arthur: 

• 50 grams starter
• 50 water
• 50 white bread flour
• 12 grams whole wheat

With the starter included, this is a 75% hydration dough. 

Ingredients: 

• 375 g water
• 12 g (2 teaspoon) salt
• 90 g (½ cups) active and recently fed starter
• 400 g white bread flour
• 100 g whole wheat flour or rye flour

Mixing the dough (5 min)

In a large bowl, mix the starter and water until dissolved, then add the salt to incorporate. Do not forget the salt. Then into that muddy water add the flours and mix the dough with a spatula, making sure all the liquid is absorbed into the dough. Cover the bowl with a wet towel.

Autolyse (1hr)

Autolyse the dough for 1 hour so you don't have to knead it: this is where you just let it sit, covered, in a shaggy, clumpy mess unattended. We're working smarter, not harder, and letting the gluten form with time rather than labor. The room temp of your kitchen matters here: the warmer, the more yeast activity. If your kitchen is cold, you might find success in a longer autolyse.

Folding Schedule (~1h30min)

You're folding 3-4 times every 30 minutes depending on how much time you have. 3 sets of folding is fine, 4 is better. 

1. Wet your hands and flick off excess moisture, then grab an edge of dough, lift up and then push it into the middle, repeat this working clockwise and scraping the side of the bowl to get as much flour incorporated as possible. until you've gone around three times.
2. Cover with towel and wait 30 minutes.
3. Repeat every 30 minutes, noting how the dough gets more supple and more elastic after each rest. 
4. When after the 4th rest, your dough should be looking cohesive and pillowy. Treat her gently.

Shaping (10 min)

1. Flip the dough out on a lightly floured surface. Work firmly and with confidence, but don't be rough, we don't want to deflate the dough. As a visual leaner, following along to this video was helpful to me. 
2. Much like folding a burrito: pull out the edges, stretching the dough into something like a rectangular sheet without breaking it. 
3. Grab the top edge and fold it down into the middle. Fold over the left side and then the right right side onto that. 
4. Then gather what you've folded and roll it tightly over the remaining flap to form your oval loaf, creating tension without tearing the dough. 
5. Gently pull the loaf towards you with the edges of your palms slightly tucked under the dough, creating tension until you are happy with your shape.
6. Flip it over into a very well floured banneton so the seam, the ugly side, is facing up. Sprinkle with flour. Some people use rice flour for this but wheat flour is fine.

Overnight ferment (10-24 hrs, depending on your fridge temp)

1. Place the banneton into a big ziplock bag and seal it, most of the time I use a compost bag I'll use later. This is to preserve the dough hydration.
2. Put it in the fridge and leave it overnight for 10 hours to 24 hours. More and it might over ferment, which you will notice in the tightness of crumb and stronger sour flavor. Not the end of the world if this happens though. Bread is bread.

Baking time (1h30min + 2 hours for cooling)

Besides a dutch oven, you'll need a metal sheet tray like one you'd use for cookies at the bottom of the oven.

1. Put your dutch oven in the oven on the middle rack with the lid on (make sure they are both oven safe!), as well as the metal tray on the bottom rack, and then preheat your oven to 500ºF degrees. 
2. Once your oven has reached temp wait 30 min more for the dutch oven to get properly hot. Take your loaf out of the fridge to let it come up to room temp for those 30 min.
3. After 30 min, carefully and quickly remove the hot dutch oven and flip the loaf into the pot as gently as you can. Quickly, with a sharp knife or box cutter, score it without burning yourself. (I do a crescent moon shape from the top to bottom holding the blade at a 45 degree angle. This allows the bread to rise very sexily.)
4. Quickly, spritz or flick the loaf with water and immediately put the lid on to preserve the steam. 
5. Immediately place it back in the oven, lid on, for 20 minutes.
6. Remove lid after 20 min, pour one cup of water into the metal sheet pan at the bottom and immediately close the oven door. 
7. Lower oven temp to 485ºF and bake for another 25 min. (You can admire the rise from the oven window if you have one but don't let too much heat escape by holding the door open for longer than you have to.)
8. After those 25 min your loaf should have risen and become a lovely rich brown color. Remove from the oven and move the loaf with a spatula to a wire rack to cool. Resist the temptation to cut into it while it's still hot, the bread is technically still cooking and will be gluey if you don't wait! I give it a good 2 hours to make sure, sometimes even waiting til the next morning for breakfast. 

Et voila, the perfect accompaniment to a meal or a meal entirely on its own with good butter, olive oil, or cheese. Also an awesome gift for friends, a loaf is always a big hit to bring to a dinner party with a homemade dip.

The bunny ear is an indication of a good rise.

Things I've learned baking sourdough

• It's really all about the starter and how happy it is. An active start is the key to loaf success. Without it there's no rise, no airiness. I baked many bricks until I realized my new starter was not yet fully established.
• Under fermenting and over fermenting effect the crumb of your bread. Wide and spacey holes? Underfermented. Many tiny holes? Overfermented. Somewhere in between? perfection. All are edible though.
• Unless you have an issue with your starter, if you screw up somewhere it'll most likely be tasty, Ugly maybe, but edible!
• I have not noticed any difference adding the salt in before the autolyse or after it. I add it from the start because otherwise I tend to forget to add the salt entirely, which leads me to the next point...
• Don't forget to add the salt! Saltless dough is not remediable once you've formed the dough. It sucks to bite into a beautiful but bland ass loaf.
• Room temp is different for every kitchen, warmer days mean a quicker ferment. Colder days mean slower. Factor that into your bread schedule.
• Get to know your dough, it'll tell you what it needs. Making sourdough not as high strung as it feels at first, you can get loosey goosie with it once you know the rules. 
• Be kind to yourself. It's bread! I leave you with a video by baker Mary Grace, who always has something positive and chill to say about baking sourdough, which I really love about her.