30+ of the BEST Sourdough Dessert Recipes (2024)

FAQs

What is the secret to sourdough? ›

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.

However, this cost does not include feeding your sourdough starter, your time or labor or the cost of electricity of equipment. So if you look solely at the ingredients, it is cheaper to make your own sourdough. But if you bring other factors into it - it might not be as cheap.

Preparing to Bake Overnight Sourdough Bread

Leave your dough in the fridge (or counter) until the very last minute - placing a cold dough into a hot oven will give you a great "spring". When your oven is at temperature, take your sourdough out of the fridge.

The Sourdough School: Sweet Baking is an indispensable guide to exploring the techniques and ingredients involved in successful sweet sourdough baking. A companion to the bestselling The Sourdough School, it focuses on sweet recipes that are gut-friendly and rely on natural sweetness where possible.

Sourdough bread may be easier to digest than white bread for some people. According to some studies, sourdough bread acts as a prebiotic, which means that the fiber in the bread helps feed the “good” bacteria in your intestines. These bacteria are important for maintaining a stable, healthy digestive system.

Sourdough relies on a mix of wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria, rather than baker's yeast, to leaven the dough. It's richer in nutrients, less likely to spike your blood sugar, contains lower amounts of gluten, and is generally easier to digest than bread made with baker's yeast.

Potential Drawbacks

Therefore, sourdough bread is not a safe choice for people with celiac disease or a wheat allergy, and it is not an ideal choice for people who are eating gluten-free or avoid wheat for any other reason.

Supermarket sourdough is often sourfaux – here's how to make the real thing. Mass-produced sourdough has been found to be adulterated with everything from vinegar to commercial yeast. Why not bake your own?

Whether you buy sourdough from the store or make your own, it has a pretty impressive nutrition profile. Most sourdough isn't made with whole-grain flour, but if you make it at home you can use whole-wheat flour for your bread.

Can you bake sourdough straight from the fridge? Yes! In fact it's best practice to take your dough from the fridge, score it and pop it straight into a hot Dutch Oven. The cold dough and hot Dutch Oven combination equals maximum oven spring.

What is the poke test for sourdough bread? ›

Gently press your finger into the dough on the top. If the dough springs back quickly, it's underproofed. If it springs back very slowly, it's properly proofed and ready to bake. Finally, if it never springs back, the dough is overproofed.

Underproofed Sourdough Bread Has a Domed Shape

This is especially due to cutting the final proof short: Bagels puff so high during baking that the holes almost close shut.

You'll find I use honey in many of my recipes. I love to use it in my no-knead 100% whole wheat sourdough bread because it makes it much softer and less dense than it would be without it. Subbing it in recipes that call for sugar is not usually as simple as a one-to-one sub, though.

Uneven heat in your oven can be the culprit – if you loaf is nicely golden on the outside but gummy or moist in the inside, it's baking too quickly on the outside. Trying reducing the temperature you're baking at and bake for a bit longer. Experiment until you find the sweet spot, and take notes along the way.

Blackley's sourdough starter, created from 4,500 year-old yeast, is considered the oldest sourdough starter, per Oldest. Other starters like the Saint Honoratus Wheat also are quite old. A bakery called Chrissi's Farmhouse Bakery uses it and said, “This noble starter dates back 900 years.

Keep the dough temperature lower: Lactic acid bacteria are most active in the higher temperatures of the mid 80s-90sºF. Keeping the dough in the 76-78º F range will still ferment and produce bacteria but will encourage lactic acid bacteria instead of acetic acid bacteria resulting in a more mild flavored loaf.

Simplicity is a virtue, and a marker of good sourdough bread. The bread should only have Flour, Water, Salt, and Starter (also referred to as Culture on some labels). While the first three are the basic ingredients, the Starter or Culture should be the natural starter used to leaven (raise) the dough.

Traditional sourdough undergoes a slow fermentation, the result of which is an increase in the bioavailability of the bread's vitamins and minerals. This process also starts the breakdown of protein (including gluten), making sourdough easier to digest.

The key taste compounds include salt, which is directly added to the dough, as well as acetic and lactic acid, produced during fermentation. After these experiments, they applied a technique called “unified flavor quantitation,” which was previously developed by Hofmann's team, to the sourdough bread.