I had to chuckle when you added a “recipe” after your call for no recipes although it did help with a very basic, low level starter. The article really helped by telling us to trust ourselves and be willing to experiment. The use of water for shaping? Amazing! Thank you so much. My greatest challenge is scoring as I would love to be able to make the pretty patterns I often see. Of course maybe the least of my bread problems!
Thank you so much for answering the questions that I have had. Beautifully written.
I find rubbing flour on top just before baking makes scoring easier
Thanks. I have tried that but still doesn’t work for me. Maybe my shaping doesn’t create a surface that is taught enough or maybe a lack of confidence on my part. Appreciate the response though and will keep trying. One day 
Totally not trying to be a call for “no recipes.” I’m trying to suggest a different way of looking at sourdough bread recipes that includes the understanding that since we are making use of a living culture, a fixed (mechanical) recipe is not going to work well consistently. So you have to learn to listen to the dough and be flexible enough to make changes in response to what the dough is telling you.
I really like the series of recipes / tutorials that @eric posted here at Breadtopia called Eric’s Easy Bake Series. In those he tried to do the same thing that I tried to do in my blog post; help people discover the intuitive side of baking sourdough bread. Though instead of being overly loquacious, as I tend to be, he did it in his typical low-key, straightforward way. Amusingly, he got a fair bit of negative feedback on this forum for not having explicit enough recipes. Talk about missing the point. Below is a link to the first episode in that series which includes links to the rest of them.
The float test works because if the starter is actively creating C02 bubbles and your starter is the right consistency, then the starter will float. But very “wet” starter that will work fine in terms of leavening your bread can also fail the float test, so it’s a good test in that pretty much any starter that passes it will leaven your bread, but it’s not such a great test in that some starter that is totally fine for bread leavening will fail the float test.
My test is mixing the starter into bread dough and seeing if the dough rises. If it works, then it was ready. Sorry if that sounds glib, but that’s really how I have learned most of what I have learned about baking bread; by trying things and noticing what works and what doesn’t work.
In the video that I included in my post where I score the dough in the oven, I’m using a blade that needs to be changed so it’s kind of dull and could work a lot better than it did, but the dough you see in that video just came out of the refrigerator for about 16 hours. Cold dough is very blade friendly.
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Right on, right on, right on. Well said.
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Thank you! I have not watched it but of course will now make a point of doing so. Beginning to think a fail-scoring is part of my DNA!
Re your tip about “Transferring Dough from Proofing Basket” - another option is to use the cold bake method which is far safer than messing with hot pots and works a treat.
I alternate between baking in a Breadtopia clay baker or Le Creuset pot.
In either case I cut a piece of parchment paper to fit the bottom of the baking vessel. Then I lay that over the dough in the banneton, place my baking vessel upside down over the banneton and then flip the whole works which deposits the paper and dough nicely into the baking vessel.
Score the dough, place the covered vessel into the **not-**preheated oven, then set the baking temperature.
I’ve been using 475°F for 30 minutes, then reducing temperature to 425° for 30 minutes and so far it’s working perfectly. Sometimes an additional 5-10 minutes uncovered browns the crust further if needed.
I use a pizza stone and a flower pot.
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Reading this revealed why I was almost giving up on sourdough. Somewhere I read that rye flour was really very good to feed your starter with. We ground some up and mixed it in. WOW the starter filled the 1 L Weck jars to overflow iin four hours from a start with only about 2" in the bottom. That’s the good news. The bad news was that we started to get turned off our breads. Just too sour. We did not make the connection to the switch to rye and how it made a more sour starter.
Thanks Eric.
Great article, thanks. So during the bulk ferment, you don’t do any intermittent folding and turning that many claim are needed for “building structure”?
Thanks again.
Expanding on a theme already well debated, there is a man (you’d know him if I mentioned his name) who traveled the world collecting, and selling starters. For years I purchased such-and-such a starter from him, thinking the one from Egypt or Romania or wherever, would have flavors like those he described, only to eventually come to the realization that all starters quickly convert to the same flavor. This is not only because of what we’re feeding it, but where we live, what pets and houseplants we keep, etc., etc. Buy that man’s San Francisco starter and within two or three feedings it will be the same as the one you made from wild yeast right in your own house.
@Golden8647 For scoring, I use a long, thin-bladed, flexible boning knife with a Nike-like swoosh shape and fine serrations. The scoring needs to be done with a single, confident stroke. The knife is always around and fits snugly in my knife block – no twin-edged razor blades lying around.
Thanks for a great article! I just gave a friend some sourdough starter with a few instructions. I’ll send her a copy of your article. More on this theme in an article I wrote a few years ago, Eighteen things I’ve learned from three years of experimentation with whole grain and wild yeast.
The wet hand trick together with using rice flour for dusting the proofing basket has been a big saver of messes in my kitchen.
And, while I prefer baking in the exact same clay baker you’ve used in your videos, I’ll often bake in a metal loaf pan, with another pan inverted on top to keep the steam in, and a spray of oil in the pan. You start with room temperature dough and vessel and just pop it in the oven. It works particularly well if the dough is sticky. Or, if I want to bake two loaves (since I only have one clay baker). Or, if I want consistent sized slices for sandwiches.
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Sounds dangerous for a clumsy twit such as myself but imagine you get impressive results. Thanks! I will definitely check out the knives though.
Be brave! The knife is much easier to handle than one of those lame bread slashing tools. And one less single-purpose tool in your kitchen. Practice and you’ll get the hang of it.
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Thanks for the timely article. I recently revived a starter that I had neglected for two years. It was happy and I was looking at recipes for sourdough discard when this bread article appeared. I need to tweak my time and temp, but I feel my first attempt in over two years was not bad.
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Thanks for the helpful article. It’s a very nice summary of a number of issues. As you probably expected, the most surprising portion was the one about a particular starter not mattering much for the end result. It made me want to revive my dehydrated, white starter and experiment again with it. In my own baking, I’ve repeatedly noticed variation between loaves’ flavor and consistency when the only difference was an all-white starter in one and a more wholegrain starter in the other (same amount of starter, same fermentation time, etc.). Maybe the difference is more indirect, given the more aggressive fermentation with higher percentages of wholegrain flour? At any rate, your “heretical” view is encouraging further experimentation. 