My Top 5 Sourdough Cookie Recipes by Make It Dough (2024)

FAQs

What is the best flour to use for sourdough? ›

Due to its wide availability and affordability, all-purpose flour is often my top recommendation for creating and maintaining a sourdough starter. In fact, I've been feeding my own sourdough starter Central Milling's all-purpose flour for the past 4 years.

If you have too much starter compared to the additional flour and water you're adding, your hungry starter consumes all the nutrients and then it's not as bubbly.

The secret to sourdough is simple: water. The more water you add to your dough will affect how open the crumb (bigger holes and softer texture) will be once it's baked.

Substituting all purpose flour in a sourdough recipe that specifically calls for bread flour is not always an even swap. You'll need to REDUCE the total amount of water first. All purpose flour absorbs less water than bread flour, which can make the dough too sticky to work with otherwise.

For more tang: Incorporate some rye flour and/or whole wheat flour early in the bread-making process, such as when feeding the mother culture and the preferment. Rye flour in particular will help your culture produce some acetic acid.

The sourdough starter is the real secret to getting a good fermentation going. Essentially your sourdough starter is old dough, which has already pre-fermented and contains Lactobacillus culture. Lactobacillus culture has a sour taste and is an active culture that lives off natural yeast spores from the air.

In fact the acidity is a dough conditioner that softens the texture of whole grains and makes the bread more pliable. Hack: apple cider vinegar. I often add about a tablespoon of ACV to bread as a dough conditioner.

Salt inhibits the acid producers more than the yeast, which means that once the levain is mixed into the main dough, the ability to produce acid is somewhat diminished.

What does adding more sourdough starter do? ›

As a general rule, the less sourdough starter you use, the slower your dough will ferment - resulting in a more sour flavored loaf. The more starter you use, the faster your dough will ferment - resulting in a less sour loaf.

It is important that you stir the sourdough starter every day in the morning and in the evening. Feed the starter. Add 60 g flour and 60 g lukewarm water, stir well to combine, and let sit out for 24 hours.

All-purpose flour works great for feeding starter, but adding a little whole grain flour can help give it a boost if needed.

While bread flour is the best option, it can sometimes be used if you don't have bread flour. “Check the protein content,” advises Chef Jürgen, since it can vary from brand to brand, and an all-purpose flour that contains protein on the higher end of the range, 12 to 13 percent, will produce a better outcome.

A Dutch oven helps you to make perfect sourdough bread because it traps steam inside the pot which stops the crust on your sourdough forming too soon. This enables your dough to expand and spring up first, giving you a lovely soft and fluffy interior and a crispy, chewy crust.

Wheat 550 – flour with even higher binding power, ideal for baking with yeast and sourdough.