Adrian's Homemade Bread

The Recipe I Started With

Here is the recipe I received way back when.  It is short, precise, and totally sufficient… for someone who has made bread a million times.  For me it was totally inadequate, but a great starting point.  Here goes:

Measures for 3 loaves:

6 Cups of flour

¼ Cup of sugar

1/3 Cup of oil

1½ Cup of warm water

1 Cup of Starter

1½ Teaspoon of salt

Mix all the ingredients together in a large, non-metallic bowl.  It will make a sticky dough.  Coat the dough with cooking oil and turn it over a couple of times to get all sides coated.  Cover the bowl loosely with a damp towel or with plastic wrap. 

Let it rise several hours.  4 to 6 hours, maybe more, depending on conditions.  Turn the dough out on a floured surface, divide into thirds, and knead each third until springy and stretchy.  Form into loaves and place in greased bread pans.  Coat with oil and cover loosely with plastic wrap or a towel.

Let it rise again.  4-6 hours, maybe more.  When it’s ready, bake for 10 minutes in a preheated oven at 350°.  Turn the temperature down to 320° and let the bread bake for 20 minutes more.

When finished baking, remove from the oven and turn out onto wire racks for cooling.

There!  That’s the recipe I received when I started making sourdough bread.  Some of you are asking, “How do I make a starter?”  Good question.  There are several methods.  One is to mix water, sugar, and potato flakes in a bowl.  Cover the bowl with one layer of cheesecloth and leave it sitting out in a warm place for several days.  Stir it several times a day.  After a few days the mixture should get all bubbly and smell, well, yeasty.

Another method is to mix the above with a pack of yeast.  Same method as above.    This one works more quickly and almost without fail.

One last point: the starter is really a medium to keep a fungus alive.  Yeast provides the fungus.  If you start out without yeast you are going to try to capture the fungus from the air, hence the cheesecloth instead of plastic.  You want microscopic fungi spores to filter through, but you want to keep visible bugs, which will remain unnamed, out.  Good luck!