# Everything you need to make great sourdough – and the kit you can do without

Sourdough is the lockdown legacy that just won’t quit. If you need a refresher, or missed the trend five years ago, here’s everything you need to get started.

## Sourdough essentials

## Good flour

Everything begins with the flour. To get started, you’ll need strong white bread flour, rye flour, and strong wholemeal flour. Quality is crucial: sourdough made with basic supermarket flour will be… well, basic. It simply won’t look or taste anywhere near as good as loaves made with high-quality grain.

The most charming thing to do, obviously, is to find your own local wheat farmers and mills and support them. Failing that,  is a favourite with UK bakers for producing various consistently reliable flours.  – or as I like to call it, Rave Flour, because it was founded by Andy Cato, 50% of Groove Armada – is increasingly popular for its regenerative backstory.

 has several interesting, seeded and flavoured flours often available in delis and supermarkets, but my personal favourite is  in Dorset, whose stoneground malted bread flour, Maltstar, is almost sinfully delicious. Then there’s , a heritage grain farm that supplies flour to . You’ll also need a bag of millet or brown rice flour for dusting bannettes to prevent dough from sticking –  sells both.

## A jam jar

Sourdough sounds complicated, but making a sourdough starter couldn’t be simpler. Truly. It’s just a case of mixing a small amount of flour with a small amount of water, leaving it alone for 24 hours, and repeating that process a few times until you see bubbles, which should be in three or four days. And all you need to do this in is a clean jam jar with a lid.

You don’t need a fancy jar, you don’t need a fancy spoon, and you don’t need to cover the top in gauze lest the yeasts can’t get in through the lid. Don’t panic – the yeasts will be fine. A  is the perfect size for most large-loaf sourdough recipes, and it’s a good idea to get two because many recipes yield two loaves.

## A baker’s lame

Once your beautiful, rested dough comes out of the banneton, you’ll need to score it with a blade before it goes in the oven. This helps the loaf rise in an orderly fashion – ie upwards. If you don’t score it, the gases will find their own weak point to escape from – often at the base of the dough, giving your loaf a funny sort of foot as it bakes. A knife won’t work for this job – you need a baker’s lame, which is essentially a razor blade on a stick. Many lames come with a pack of razor blades, which will see you through many bakes.

## A Dutch oven

The best way to make sourdough that looks like it’s emerged from a bakery is to bake it inside a Dutch oven. You can use any cast-iron casserole pot that holds about 5 litres, but what you really want is one with a flat lid so you can flip the whole thing upside down, lay and score your dough in the shallower lid, and reduce the likelihood of you either mangling your precious dough baby as you drop it into the hot pot or – more importantly – burning yourself. A  is my go-to – I have four and stack them across two ovens when I cook several loaves at once.

## Heat-resistant gloves

You’re going to be heating these Dutch ovens to about 250C inside your oven and letting them preheat for an hour or so, so let me tell you (from scalding experience) that tea towels and granny’s oven mitts ain’t gonna cut it. Some heavy-duty heat-resistant baker’s gloves – often called barbecue gloves – are your new best friends. You’ll also be able to handle the dough, the lame, the pot, and the cooked loaf with more precision and in much less of a flap if you’re wearing gloves for the whole process. American Ove Gloves are perfect – not too long or thick, and easy to slip on and off – as are the similar ones from Coopers of Stortford.

## A good toaster

Imagine the insanity of pulling your beautiful, burnished, crackling-to-the-point-of-singing homemade loaf from the oven, only to have to hack it into wafer-thin half slices to fit it in a measly British toaster when you want it for breakfast the next day. Come on. The only toaster in any self-respecting sourdough baker’s kitchen should be the Dualit Long Slot Lite toaster with extra wide 36mm slots, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

## Proper butter

It’s an insult to the farmer who grew the wheat and, frankly, yourself to spend three days making sourdough and then slather it in supermarket butter. What you want on your special bread is tandsmør levels of joyful creaminess. Treat yourself to Fen Farm Dairy’s raw cultured Bungay Butter, the preposterously creamy stuff from Ampersand Dairy, or some of that really sexy unpasteurised butter from Normandy , which you can get at Ocado. Heck, once you’re this far down the rabbit hole, just make the butter yourself. All you need is the best double cream money can buy, salt, a  fitted with the paddle attachment, and lots of clingfilm. Lots. Seriously, trust me on the lots.

## A good bread knife

Proper sourdough requires a proper instrument to slice through that delectably golden outer crust and that sticky, squidgy interior without squishing it flat or driving you wild with frustration. You need a long, sturdy, serrated knife: Kitchen Provisions sells a beautiful, extra-long, 36cm Japanese bread knife. I’m partial to a trusty Victorinox Swiss classic bread knife, which is strong, easy to handle, and will stay sharp for years with no sharpening.

## A decent book

Everyone has a totally different way of making sourdough, and if you read all the books and listen to all the experts at once, your brain will surely explode with conflicting numbers and timings and flour types and temperatures. The best thing to do, at the start of your journey, is to pick a side and stick to it. The book I learned from is Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, owner of the legendary San Francisco bakery, but , author of the award-winning sourdough blog of the same name, is also a bit of a bible.  based on everything learned by running the killer bakery in east London, as has Michelle Eshkeri, owner of north London’s beloved Margot Bakery, in her book .

## Don’t bother with …

### A thermometer

If you want to get super-duper science class about making sourdough, sure, get a probe thermometer (nothing I’ve used beats a ). However, it’s not initially necessary, will make you stressed even thinking about making sourdough in the winter, and can prevent you from developing innate sourdough instincts, which is the key to bread-baking becoming second nature.

### Shower caps

Covering your dough with a shower cap while it proves to stop it from drying out is unnecessary. Bakeries aren’t covering 200 loaves with shower caps every night before they close their fridges and, what’s more, a little bit of dryness at the top of the dough will stop it from sticking to your gloves when you scoop it out of the banneton to bake.

### A proving machine

Unless you live in an igloo, there should always be a warm enough spot in your house to make sourdough, even in the dead of British winter. It could be simply near a radiator or inside a switched-off oven with the light on. Yes, sourdough will ferment, grow and prove faster in the summer and slower when it’s cooler, but there are ways to speed things up when it’s cold, such as using hot water or adding more sourdough starter to your mix. If you do live in an igloo, here’s a  you can try.

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Martha de Lacey is a freelance writer and sourdough baking teacher running classes at Quince Bakery in Islington, London in April and May. To reserve a spot, email her at  or join her online sourdough course at 

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