Sourdough bread recipes
Every sourdough bread recipe here is the same handful of ingredients: flour, water, salt, and ripe starter. What changes between them is the hydration, the flour, and above all the schedule, because that is what has to fit your day. Pick the recipe by when you can be in the kitchen, not by how impressive the crumb photo looks.
All weights are in grams. Grams matter more in sourdough than in almost any other baking, because the ratios between flour, water, and starter are the recipe.
Start here if it is your first loaf
A 500 g flour formula at a forgiving 70% hydration, with every stage explained and the cues to judge by feel. Nothing exotic: a Dutch oven, a bowl, and a scale.
→ How to bake your first sourdough loaf
The recipes
| Recipe | Hydration | Schedule | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| First loaf | 70% | One day, ~9 hours | Learning the stages |
| Country loaf | 75% | One day, ~10 hours | An open crumb and deep crust |
| Overnight sourdough | 72% | Evening mix, morning bake | Workdays |
| Same-day sourdough | 70% | Start to sliced in ~8 hours | Baking on a day off |
How to pick a hydration
Hydration is water as a percent of flour. It sets how the dough handles and how open the crumb turns out.
- 65-70%. Firm, easy to shape, tighter crumb. The right place to learn.
- 70-75%. The everyday range for a country loaf. Open crumb without fighting the dough.
- 75-85%. Slack and sticky. Great crumb when it works, unforgiving when it does not.
Work out any formula, or scale one to a different loaf count, with the baker’s percentage calculator. More on what the number does: sourdough hydration explained and the hydration chart.
Before you mix
Two things decide the loaf before you touch flour.
- A starter at its peak. Risen, domed, bubbly through the middle. If it is sluggish, fix that first: why isn’t my starter rising.
- A dough temperature you actually know. Bulk time swings by hours across a few degrees. Take the temperature after mixing and time from there, not from a recipe written in someone else’s kitchen. Estimate yours with the fermentation calculator.
Fitting a bake around your day
The bake itself is 45 minutes. Everything else is waiting, and the waiting is movable. Warm the dough to run it faster, cool it to stretch it out, or park it in the fridge overnight and finish in the morning. Working backward from when you want bread out of the oven is the practical way to plan it: sourdough baking schedule, or use the bake schedule planner.
If the loaf does not come out right
That is normal and it is fixable. Match the symptom to the cause in the sourdough troubleshooting index, change one variable, and bake again.
All timings on these pages are estimates based on temperature. Read the dough, not the clock: judge bulk by rise and feel, and bake to a deep crust and an internal temperature of 96-99 C (205-210 F).