How to Make Sourdough Bread: An Honest Beginner's Guide

Most sourdough guides make it sound like a spiritual practice requiring specialist equipment, a fermentation degree, and a thermometer accurate to half a degree. It isn't. People have been making this bread for thousands of years without any of that.

It does require understanding a few things most guides skim over — which is why so many first loaves come out dense, gummy, or sour in a way that's unpleasant rather than interesting.

What a starter actually is

Sourdough uses a "starter" — a mixture of flour and water you feed regularly so that wild yeast and bacteria from the flour colonise it and keep it active. This replaces the commercial yeast in normal bread.

You can get a starter from a friend, from a bakery (many give them away), or from a sourdough group online. You can also make your own from scratch in about a week using equal weights of flour and water, refreshed daily. A new starter needs time to become reliably active, so if yours is very young and hasn't given you a consistent rise yet, give it another week before assuming something's wrong with your bread.

An active starter should double in size within 4–8 hours of feeding and smell tangy-yeasty rather than acetone-sharp. If it smells like nail varnish remover, it's hungry. Feed it.

Why beginners fail

The most common reason for a dense, flat loaf is under-fermented dough. The starter wasn't active enough, the kitchen was too cold, or the bulk fermentation was cut short because the recipe gave a time rather than a target.

Time-based instructions are why beginners struggle. "Bulk ferment for 4 hours" means nothing useful, because the correct duration depends almost entirely on your dough temperature. At 24°C, 4 hours might be right. At 18°C — a normal British kitchen in winter — you might need 8 or 10.

Watch the dough, not the clock. A properly fermented bulk is noticeably more airy, domed, and jiggly than when you started. If yours looks exactly as dense as when you mixed it, it hasn't gone far enough.

Flour choice matters more than almost anything else

Strong white bread flour (12% protein or higher) is the standard starting point. Marriages, Shipton Mill, and Waitrose's own-brand strong white bread flour all work well. Avoid supermarket "plain flour" — it doesn't have enough protein to build the gluten structure you need.

Once you're comfortable, you can start replacing 10–30% of the white flour with wholemeal or rye. Wholemeal adds flavour and nutrients; rye ferments quickly and adds a distinctive earthiness. More than 30% wholemeal as a beginner makes the dough harder to handle and the loaf harder to read.

Hydration — the ratio of water to flour — gets talked about a lot in sourdough circles. High-hydration doughs (80%+) produce an open, airy crumb when done well. They're also much harder to shape than a 70% dough, which is why so many beginners following trendy recipes end up with a loaf that spreads sideways on the oven floor.

Start at 70% hydration. Get a good loaf first. Add water later when you understand what the dough should feel like.

The one number that matters: temperature

Fermentation speed is driven by temperature. This is the thing most beginners need to internalise, because it explains almost every unexplained failure.

Warmer kitchen: faster fermentation, easier to over-prove. Cooler kitchen: slower fermentation, easy to under-prove. Both produce poor bread, but in different ways.

A simple approach: do your bulk fermentation at room temperature and check every hour or two rather than setting a timer. Then do your final prove overnight in the fridge (8–12 hours at 4–6°C). Cold proving slows everything down, makes the dough much easier to score, and develops better flavour. It also means you can bake in the morning when you're ready, rather than watching the clock at midnight.

Equipment you don't need yet

You don't need a banneton (proving basket) to start. A floured bowl lined with a clean tea towel works fine. The pattern a banneton leaves is aesthetic, not functional.

You don't need a lame (a razor scoring tool). A sharp serrated knife or a disposable razor blade works fine. The purpose of scoring is to give the bread a controlled place to expand — it doesn't require specialist kit.

You do need a Dutch oven or heavy lidded casserole. This is the single most important piece of equipment for home sourdough because it traps steam in the first phase of baking, which is what allows the crust to spring up rather than set rigid too early. Most people already own something that works — a cast iron pot, a Le Creuset, an Ikea Aptitlig stockpot. Preheat it empty in the oven so it's as hot as possible when the dough goes in.

You probably need a digital kitchen scale. Bread by weight is far more consistent than by volume.

What good sourdough looks and tastes like

A good starter loaf should have a crackling crust that sounds hollow when tapped, a reasonably open crumb (not necessarily the enormous bubbles you see in photos, but not a solid dense interior either), and a mild, pleasant sourness. Deep sour flavour develops with cold proving and time, so if you want a more acidic loaf, let the fridge prove go longer.

The first loaf is rarely perfect. The second is usually better. By the fourth or fifth you'll understand what your starter, your kitchen, and your flour do together — and that understanding is worth more than any recipe.

Related: How to sharpen your kitchen knife properly · Coffee from bean to cup — a beginner's guide · Why learning a physical skill is worth your time

The airgap.life sourdough course takes you from building a starter through to a consistent, bakeable loaf — with the troubleshooting context that recipe sites never include.