What are the tools you need to get started making your own sourdough bread at home?

Not much, honestly! Part of the beauty of sourdough is its simplicity. It’s extremely simple to make, needing only flour, water, salt, and some sourdough starter (which itself is made from just water and flour). There are many, many factors that will affect your bread, which is where it can get complicated and scientific, but it is a beautiful and addicting process that I hope you embark on and enjoy!

If you’re brand new to sourdough, maybe you’ve never made a loaf before or not even entirely sure what it is, I’ll walk you through what you need to get started. As already stated above, you probably already have everything!

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Sourdough Ingredients:

• Flour - either all-purpose flour or bread flour. Small percentages of whole wheat and other types of flour can be added in, as desired. For the sake of simplicity, it’s nice to start out with 1 - 2 flours.

• Water - sourdough likes spring water, filtered purified water, bottled water…it doesn’t do as well on distilled water, tap water that has been treated, or hard water.

• Salt

• Sourdough starter - you can purchase one, find a friend who will share with you, or start your own. Soon I’ll put up a little guide to starting your own starter. It’s very simple, but sometimes can require a little troubleshooting. You only need flour and water.

Sourdough Tools

Getting Started

To make a basic loaf of sourdough bread, you’ll need:

• a bowl for mixing

• a kitchen scale*

• something to cover the bowl with (plastic wrap, beeswax wrap, clean towel, etc)

• a small workspace

• parchment paper

• an oven

• oven mitts

• a sharp knife

• Dutch oven or similar enclosed baking vessel*

Simple, right? With these things, you can make sourdough bread. It is more than possible, and a good place to start before investing in more tools. It may not be the perfect loaves you see in bakeries or in pictures, but even if you start with allll the tools, your first loaves probably wouldn’t be perfect anyway.

*It IS possible to make sourdough without a scale or Dutch oven. However, the vast majority of recipes are by weight, as this is key to understanding sourdough. So while there are a few kind souls out there who have shared sourdough recipes that include weight and cups/teaspoon measurements, it is really worth getting a scale. You can find inexpensive ones for less than $15. Same goes for a dutch oven. Starting without one may offer more discouraging results than encouraging. Yes, you definitely can bake sourdough straight on a pizza stone, baking steel, or even a cookie sheet, but it’s trickier to get the proper amount of steam for optimal bread when you open bake like this. Starting with a dutch oven eliminates one more variable you may have to work with.

Not to mention, with both a scale and dutch oven, they are multi-purpose. Even if you don’t continue with sourdough bread, scales offer more consistent results for baking, and dutch ovens are wonderful for cooking.

If using a scale doesn’t appeal to you, for sourdough or any baking, consider reading this article to understand the benefits to baking with a scale.

There is not much between you and your first loaves of sourdough bread. Honestly, sourdough baking may seem intimidating, but if you can take that first step and simply try it, a whole new world of fun will be open to you, not to mention fresh, homemade, healthier bread.