Check out Dom's Beginners Page for invaluable help on getting started with Sourdough. A series of 5 basic tutorials on sourdough baking. The tutorials are:
How to make your own starter.
How to use short kneads to handle moist doughs and bake a loaf with a yeast-based preferment.
The subtleties of proving a loaf using a ‘biga’.
How to shape a loaf using a hybrid recipe.
The final crucial steps and putting it all together to bake a 100% sourdough loaf.
Including images inside forum posts
This tutorial will teach you how to place images
inside your forum posts, using the Sourdough Companion Gallery-->
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Replies
Hi, I'm new to classic sour dough recipes but 've been using Jim Lahey's no knead method of long proving time, high hydration and cooking in a pot for the last 3 or 4 months. Does leaving the the first ferment for 18 -24 hrs mean I've been making sour dough all this time? Anyway look forward to learning lots and trying new methods.
Sorry, mean't to start a new thread rather than tag onto this one. Delete as necessary.
my opinion is that if the bread taste like sourdough then it is sourdough. I'm a beginner as well, and like to cheat. I use a bread machine, and make my bread in two steps using my sourdough starter. I can let the first step rise for a long time without the taste going too sour, the second step if my house is too cold I add a little bit of active yeast to help my sourdough rise faster, if I don't my sourdough takes a longer time to rise, and my bread sometimes gets more sour tasting than I like. I'm just a beginner and only make a small loaf for myself.
But what "sourdough tastes like" differs a LOT from region to region!
It's sourdough if you use a natural leaven - no baker's yeast. How it tastes depends on what flours you use and how you handle the dough.