Recipe: Lazy Sourdough (aka The Loaf 3.0)

Those of you who have been hanging around Wordloaf since the early days know that one of the earliest recipes I shared here was what I called "The Loaf," because it was a basic template for many of the other formulas I made and shared back then. Here's how I described its attributes:

One: It uses a relatively small amount of levain...Two: It can be done using either recently-refreshed levain or levain that has been in cold storage for up to 10 days. Meaning there’s no “levain build”, provided you have recently-refreshed levain in the fridge...And three: Other than a single fold after 30 minutes (mostly there to even out the salt distribution), there is no kneading or additional folding involved; you simply leave the dough to ferment and develop gluten strength all on its own...

It's essentially a no-knead sourdough, a tiny amount of starter in place of yeast and a long, cool fermentation to build structure, acidity, and volume. It works great, and it requires very little effort relative to the reward, which was why I iterated on it so often.

But here's the thing: Despite having embraced that recipe for so long, I never bake that way any more. My sourdoughs—including all of the formulas in Breaducation—are far more hands-on, because I think you get better results when you get your hands in a dough more fully.

More importantly, I think you gain a much better sense of what is happening in a dough when you do. No-knead/hands-off recipes are great when you have limited amounts of time to spend making bread, but they don't make for great learning opportunities, particularly when it comes to the early phases of the process, dough development and fermentation. In the course of writing the book I learned to bake well by doing things the "hard" way, and now the "hard" way is the only way. I don't seek out complication for complication's sake—I still try to make my recipes as simple and streamlined as possible—but I do think there is a minimum amount of dough "intimacy" necessary if you want to learn to bake well and to make great bread consistently, particularly when you want to create recipes of your own.

Plus, I'll admit, there's joy to be found in being intimate with your bread. It never occurred to me to put it this way before now, but I write bread recipes to maximize the joy to be had in the process as much as the results. I derive pleasure from being intimate with my doughs and I want as much up-close-and-personal time with them as possible. Joy is and should be an end in itself, but it's a fact that finding joy in bread baking makes one a better baker too, because finding it there keeps one coming back for more.

All that said, given The Loaf's importance to Wordloaf—and its popularity—I did try to get a version of it into Breaducation. But it was one that was deeply informed by all that I'd learned about baking bread in the interim. To distinguish it from The Loaf—and Loaf 2.0, its somewhat-improved follow-up—I called it "Lazy Sourdough," because it required far less effort than any other formula in the book, and because it is the sort of bread I'd make if I was feeling lazy (or pressed for free time), but still wanted something that did not compromise on results. It's not that different from either of the Loafs, except in two key ways: It is machine-mixed and -developed, using a bassinage—which makes it easier to shape and gives it a way nicer crumb, despite being otherwise still mostly hands-off—and it uses a fractional amount of seed, which keeps sourness at bay.

The Lazy Sourdough remained in the Breaducation TOC until quite late in the game, but—given how little it overlapped with the other recipes in the book—it ended up on the cutting-room floor when I needed to find room for more front matter (i.e, all the stuff in a cookbook that comes before the recipes, which is the point of Breaducation IMO).

Thus I am sharing it—along with two variations, a 20% spelt and a 50% whole-wheat version, each of which is easily tweaked using other whole-grain flours—here instead, exclusively for Wordloaf paid subscribers. Find it below after the fold, and hit me up with questions here, or in the Discord server, where I will create a thread for it within the #wordloaf-recipes channel.

—Andrew