Last week in my Saturday morning email I shared that I have a simple method for making sourdough bread. I heard from so many people asking for the recipe and method, so here it is! (Are you on the email list? If not, add your email to the signup on the homepage)

This post has more photos than probably any other post I’ve ever written, but I wanted you to see the bread at every step.

Hands on time required

Start to finish, I probably spend about 25 minutes hands on with this bread. However, that is spread over about 36 or so hours, so it’s a few minutes here and there.

The key to making sourdough bread regularly is to make it fit into your life. I feed the starter the night before I want to use it. The next morning, I stir the dough together while I clean up the kitchen.

I do the flip and folds (keep reading for that info) over the course of a couple hours, but each one only takes 30 seconds of me actually messing with the dough.

That evening, I spend 3-5 minutes placing the dough on a floured towel, bundling it up and putting it in the fridge.

The next morning when I get up, I preheat the oven for an hour while I work out. I pop the bread in the oven and bake it while I eat breakfast and have coffee.

You can change this schedule to fit your own needs. It’s flexible!

Making Starter

I don’t remember which site I got the starter recipe from, but I did something very similar to this recipe. I did use whole wheat flour to start it and then fed it bread flour, which that site recommends.

I also baked my Whole Wheat Bread recipe on the day I started my sourdough starter so I had a lot of yeast in the air. I don’t know if that helped or not, but it all worked well.

Another note on the starter: I only feed mine when I want to bake. I’ve left it in the fridge for a whole month without feeding it and it was fine.

I also never feed and discard. I just feed it enough so I have what I need for mixing the dough the next day.

The Recipe

I’m putting the recipe here at the top of the post so it’s easier to find, but do scroll down to see the process with all the photos.

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Sourdough Bread

Simple sourdough bread recipe

Servings: 1 loaf

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 cups bread flour
• 2 tsp kosher salt
• 1/2 cup sourdough starter
• 1 1/3 cups warm water

Instructions

• Stir together flour and salt in a 3-4 quart mixing bowl.
• Add 1/2 cup sourdough starter and 1 1/3 cups warm water to the flour.
• Stir the dough with a wooden spoon until it forms a ball.
• Cover with a lid or plastic wrap and let rest 30 minutes.
• Remove cover and do a flip & fold - lift one edge of the dough with your hand and fold it over the top of the ball. Turn the bowl 1/4 turn and do the same thing. Keep working your way around the dough until you've done four folds.
• Cover the dough again and let rest another 30 minutes. Repeat this process for a total of four times.
• Let the dough sit on the counter, covered all day.
• In the evening, flour a kitchen towel (one without terry) and put the dough in the center of the floured towel. Bundle up the dough and place it in a bowl in the refrigerator.
• The next morning or when you are ready to bake, place a dutch oven in the oven and preheat at 500 degrees for an hour.
• Take the dough from the fridge and place it on a sheet of parchment paper.
• Use a knife to score the top of the dough.
• Carefully lift the parchment paper into the hot dutch oven. Cover with the lid and bake 20 minutes.
• Remove the lid. Turn the oven down to 475 degrees and bake another 20 minutes.
• Place the finished bread on a cooling rack.

Equipment Needed

There’s nothing special needed to make sourdough. A 3-4 quart mixing bowl, a wooden spoon, rubber spatula, measuring cups, flour sack towel, parchment paper and a dutch oven for baking. My sister often uses stoneware loaf pans to bake her bread.

I also use a meat slicer to slice the bread. More on that later in the post.

Step One – Feed the Starter

The night before you want to make the dough (two days before you want to bake the bread), remove the starter from the fridge and feed it 1/2 cup flour and 1/2 cup water. Stir well and leave it out on the counter overnight.

Step Two – Mix the dough

In a large bowl, stir together 3 1/2 cups flour and 2 tsps salt. Add 1/2 cup sourdough starter and 1 1/3 cups warm water. Stir well until the dough comes together to form a ball.

The dough will look pretty “shaggy” at first. Cover it with a lid or plastic wrap and let it sit for about 30 minutes.

Then you will do a series of four flip and folds, with about 30 minutes between each. No need to time them.

To do a flip and fold, lift one side of the dough with your hand and fold it over towards the middle. Turn the bowl 1/4 turn and do it again, repeating until you’ve worked your way around the bowl.

The photo below shows what the dough looks like after each flip and fold. By the time you’ve finished the fourth one, about two hours has gone by, but it’s only taken you about 30 seconds each time to mess with the dough.

Step Three – Let the dough sit

Cover the dough and let it sit on the counter all day. Easy!

In the evening, flour a kitchen towel and plop the dough out of the bowl and into the center of the towel.

Bundle it up and place it in a smaller bowl. I use an old glass mixing bowl. Place the dough in the fridge overnight. You can also leave it for a day or two in the fridge before baking if that fits your schedule better.

Step Four – Bake the loaf

Put the dutch oven in the oven and preheat for an hour at 500 degrees, so both the baking pan and the oven are hot.

Place the dough on a piece of parchment paper. Use a knife to score the top of the dough.

Carefully lift the parchment with the dough into the hot dutch oven. Cover with a lid and bake 20 minutes.

Remove the lid, turn down the heat to 475 degrees and bake another 20 minutes.

Remove the baked loaf to a cooling rack and let cool completely. You’ll be tempted to slice a piece and eat it right away and I’m not going to tell you not to do that! It’s part of the reward for baking fresh bread!

I use a meat slicer to slice the bread into even slices and then I bag them up and put them in the freezer. We pull frozen slices out and toast them when we want.

I hope this post inspires you to start baking sourdough. I haven’t bought sandwich bread at the store since I started baking sourdough a year ago.

In the summer of 2019, I decided to quit sugar.

I’d been thinking about it and working to eat healthier and exercise.  I knew I was a sugar addict, but the thought of never eating all the things I loved was not a pleasant one.

However, I had what Gretchen Rubin calls a “lighting bolt” moment. This is when a realization triggers a sudden, almost effortless change. (Emphasis on almost effortless, because it did take work and commitment.)

In July 2019, I was talking with someone about health and he said to “pay attention to how you feel”. Later that day, my youngest daughter brought me my favorite drink from Starbucks. I slurped down the iced caramel macchiato and instantly got a headache.

That was it for me. I knew I had to give up sugar.

Here’s how I did it

Ditching dessert was the “easy” part. It’s easy to identify that sugar is in desserts and just avoid them. But I did need to put in a bit of work to figure out all the places sugar was hiding in the other foods I ate.

Giving up sugar also meant giving up ketchup, barbecue sauce, cereal, granola bars, jelly, jam, some salad dressings…

I became very good at reading labels and avoided anything with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, glucose, fructose, lactose, honey, maple syrup, brown sugar, cane sugar, barley malt, agave…

I also avoided anything with artificial sweeteners. I knew that my brain needed a total detox and I couldn’t just trick myself with a artificial sweetener and successfully ditch my addiction.

The Practicalities

At that time, I was still eating dairy, so I ditched all the sugar in my coffee but still added half and half.

I began to associate the sweet treats with headaches. I would see something sweet and think to myself, “that’s just a big headache waiting to happen”.

I ate a lot of fruit. I allowed myself to eat all the fruit I wanted.  I know there’s a lot of info out there that fruit also spikes your blood sugar, but for me it really worked to allow myself to eat fruit while others were eating ice cream. Eventually, my fruit intake dropped off to more normal levels.

I still eat pasta and bread (mostly homemade sourdough these days). Certainly at the beginning of giving up sugar, I didn’t worry about other carbs. My goal was to give up the addiction I had to sweets.

Resources

I decided to fortify my decision with some reading. I got the book The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes and read it in a few days. That helped solidify all the reasons behind my new no-sugar habit.

I haven’t read it, but I’ve heard good things about Allen Carr’s methods, so this book might help too.

Results

The most surprising result was that immediately my internal fighting went away.

All the brain chatter saying, “You just had two cookies and shouldn’t have more. But maybe I can have one more now and then later still have ice cream….”

All that internal fighting went away and I felt so free! Until it went away, I didn’t realize how much brain space that was taking up in my mind.

Another surprising result – I didn’t lose any weight. This wasn’t the main reason I gave up sugar, but I was hoping I would lose weight as a result. It turns out my body is very slow to change as far as what the scale shows. (I did eventually lose weight, but it took a long while.)

Still, I kept up with the no sugar habit because I felt better. I wasn’t gorging myself on cookies and ice cream like I had in the past and so I didn’t have that sick feeling that I so often did when I used to indulge.

The other benefit was that giving up sugar meant I gave up 80% of the processed foods I’d been eating. That put me on a faster path toward health.

Why Give Up Sugar

There isn’t a single healthy eating plan out there that has processed sugar  or processed foods as part of the plan. Every eating plan from whole food plant based to carnivore ditches sugars and processed foods.

In fact, I’d venture to say the common denominator in all those plans – and the reason people see results on very different eating plans – is they all ditch the processed sugars and other processed foods.

Giving up sugar will get you 80% of the way to your goal of eating only whole foods. And that means you’re fast-tracking your health.

Sugar also plays a role in cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimers…. the list is long. There are big reasons to get off sugar now.

Our Goal: Eat Food that Energizes Us

We want to be healthy and full of energy and that’s going to require changes on our part. I promise that it’s worth it though! We either “pay” for our good health now by putting in the work to make changes or we pay for it later with sickness and disease that robs us of enjoying life.

There are two meal plans included in Eat at Home Meal Plans that will help you with this. The No Flour/No Sugar Plan and the Whole Food Plant Based Plans are great places to start for dinner ideas. You can use the discount code NOW to save 30% off your membership.

Healthy 15 Minute Meals

Mediterranean Chicken Skillet

Tomato Basil Chicken Soup

What’s your “lightning bolt” moment?

That one Starbucks drink changed everything for me.

What’s your “lightning bolt” moment when it comes to health? The time you realized something had to change?

Drop it in the comments.  I’d love to hear your story.

(And if you’re ready to start changing your meals, the Eat at Home Meal Plans No Flour/No Sugar Plan or Whole Food Plant Based Plan is a great place to begin. Use code NOW to save 30%.)

About ten years ago, I had a mid-life awareness.

I realized that if I kept going the direction I was going with my eating and sedentary lifestyle, it would not lead me anywhere good.

I realized I could no longer rely on youth for my health. Instead, I was going to have to change some things.

Up to that point in my life, I’d never worked out at all. I never thought I would either.

I also never watched what I ate. I hadn’t needed to do that when I was younger.

But as I approached 50 years old, things changed.

Over the next ten years, I started moving in the direction of health. Now I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been and I’m healthy.

How did I do it?

I built little bridges to health.

I started with walking. Then I reduced the amount of sugar I spooned into my coffee.

I tried various diets – intermittent fasting, carb cycling, Whole30…

Some worked for me, others didn’t. When something didn’t work, I moved on to try another new habit.

I kept upping my exercise program, aiming for harder workouts.

I gave up sugar entirely.

I tried eating whole food plant based, something that has worked for me.

Each change was like a bridge towards health.

The Tiny Bridge Method

Think of health like the city of Venice, Italy. Every bridge moves you deeper into the city and around each corner is another beautiful view.

Our healthy habits are like that. Build a bridge – a habit. Follow it to see where it leads.

If the habit works for you, leave that bridge intact and build another new bridge.

If the habit doesn’t work for you, move on to build another new bridge towards health.

Every habit bridge leads you towards energy and health.

Some of the bridges you build will be small, like how I reduced the sugar in my coffee.

Other bridges will need to be bigger, like giving up sugar entirely.  Once you’ve built a number of small bridges that hold up, then you’re ready to build a big one.

By that point, you’ve proved to yourself that you can make healthy changes that stick and that it’s important to you to do so.

What’s your first bridge?

I’d love to know what bridge you’re building now. Leave me a comment to let me know.

Easy and Healthy Dinner Ideas

If you’re looking for a simple, healthy dinner idea, try one of these two recipes. Or try both!

Sheet Pan Tex Mex Pork Chops and Veggies

Maple Balsamic Roast Chicken Sheet Pan Dinner

As I’ve been interacting with Eat at Home readers, I’ve found that we all want one thing when it comes to our health.

Energy!

Energy is how healthy feels in our body.

We want to feel energetic to do the things we love to do and the things we need to do. We want to be able to show up and enjoy our friends and family.

In order to build energy, we need to focus on fueling our bodies with good food.

Eat food that energizes you!

This is my Energy Equation (and yes, I stole it from Einstein and totally changed the meaning, but it’s memorable so let’s go with it).

The Energy Equation (E = MC²)

E stands for Energy.

M stands for Mindset.

C stands for Change and new habits.

And the exponent² stands for Exponential. This is the multiplier that takes the Mindset and Change and exponentially expands them for greater Energy.

What does all this mean?

It means there’s a huge connection between how much energy we have and our mindset. 

If we realize that we are capable of growing and changing who we are and what we eat, that has a direct impact on building energy.

There’s a connection between the positive changes we make and the energy we build.

The changes we make in our habits around eating will impact our energy – for better or worse. Let’s make sure it’s for better! Let’s make sure our habits are building little bridges to better health and energy.

There’s opportunity to exponentially surpass any of our previous attempts at energy. 

When we bring all of this together with focus and purpose, we can build real energy into our lives.

That’s what the next few weeks in this blog series will be about. My goal is to make this simple and doable.

I’ll give you practical ideas on how to build energy by getting your mindset right and making changes in your habits so you can exponentially build energy and health.

I’ll also be giving you recipe ideas so you can eat food that energizes you.

If all that sounds good, I hope you’ll join me for this series!

Energy Recipe

Detox Salad

This is one of my favorite salads! It’s full of leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables and it tastes amazing!