Introduction

Different people are driven to this bread for different reasons. For me, memories of chewy, texture-driven, sweetly sour tasting breads of my home town European bakers in Melbourne caused me, after a year or so of modest baking successes with 'inferior' breads, to try my hand at this enigmatic loaf. I recently read the comment from an old french sourdough enthusiast that, 'I only eat sourdough bread, everything else tastes like cake.' Other authors call it 'the zen of bread-making,' or, 'the true bread.' Like all enigmas, the attraction seems to be in the tension between the promise of greatness and the mystique of the unknown. Or, as I reflect on my own experience, learning the art of sourdough has been a fascinating process of occassional triumphant successes amidst a steady normality of spectacular, sometimes humorous, failure.

By way of introduction, I hope this gives some encouragement to those who will attempt this difficult bread and suffer similar frustrations and set-backs. Persevere! Like life, the failures are quickly forgotten when the bread-knife slides through the compressed crumb of a well-made sourdough. I hope that this article offers some kind of short-circuit through the iterative process of flat loaves, sticky-benches, sickly tastes and rock-hard textures. I still have many questions about what is going on in my sourdough methodology -- this is a work in progress -- and therefore feedback is welcomed. But it seemed right to share what I know thusfar, particularly the annotations that I found so lacking in others' depictions of the sourdough story.

The rest of this article is organised as follows. First a review of terminology is given as a reference for novice bakers. Second, a method for forming the starter is given, mostly unchanged from the previous revision. Next, and at the heart of the present method, the components of the wet-dough method are set out, followed by a few different implementations of this basic method. Finally, a discussion of common problems and frequently asked question is given.

NB: A familiarity with general kneeding methods and dough handling is assumed.