Country Sourdough Recipe

Country sourdough is the loaf that got a generation of home bakers obsessed: a round boule with a blistered mahogany crust, a dramatic ear where the blade opened it, and an open, custardy crumb full of irregular holes. It is raised entirely by a sourdough {levain} — no commercial yeast — which is where the tang, the keeping quality, and the faint nuttiness come from. This is a weekend project rather than a weeknight one, but nearly all of that time is the dough working on its own.

The ratio is the classic Tartine baseline: 100% bread flour, 75% water, 2% salt, 20% starter. That 75% hydration is doing the most work — wet enough for the open crumb people chase, but slack and sticky enough that it is the main reason this loaf is intermediate rather than beginner. The 20% starter is a moderate inoculation: enough to raise the loaf overnight without souring it into sharpness. I keep the default at straight bread flour because it is the simplest thing that works; for more flavor and a livelier ferment, swap 10–20% of the flour for whole wheat in the Advanced panel, the way many well-known versions do.

Two things make or break it. The first is reading the bulk ferment by rise and feel, not the clock — a 78°F kitchen and a 68°F kitchen are hours apart, and underproofed sourdough bakes dense while overproofed sourdough spreads flat. The second is the overnight {cold-retard}: it deepens the sour flavor, firms the dough so you can score it cleanly, and gives you that sharp ear. A Dutch oven to trap steam for the first half of the bake does the rest.

This recipe assumes you already keep an active starter. If you do not, the sourdough-starter-from-scratch guide walks through building one from flour and water over about a week. Every number here is cross-referenced against the standard modern sourdough references, with the conservative midpoint as the default and the wider ranges exposed in the calculator.