Smart Sourdough: The No-Starter, No-Waste, No-Cheat, No-Fail Way to Make Naturally Fermented Bread in 24 Hours or Less: Smart Fermenting, #1

SMART SOURDOUGH

The

No-Starter

,

No-Waste

,

No-Cheat

,

No-Fail

Way to Make Naturally Fermented Bread in

24 Hours

or 

Less

By Mark Shepard

Shepard Publications

Bellingham, Washington

Copyright © 2021, 2025 by Mark Shepard

Ebook Version 1.2

Though the method described in this book is strictly my own, it has benefited a great deal from the publicly shared knowledge of many bakers, fermenters, and scientists. Special thanks go to Michael G. Gänzle, Daniel Wing, Debra Wink, Kurt Janz, Sandor Ellix Katz, Peter Reinhart, Ken Forkish, Stanley Ginsberg, William Alexander, the cooks at America’s Test Kitchen, and the researchers of the Sourdough Project. Thanks for valuable feedback go to Pamela O. Lilley, Kirsten and Christopher Shockey, and the commenters in The Fresh Loaf forum. Above all, thanks to my beloved wife, Anne L. Watson, who along with testing provided support, suggestions, and most crucially, tasting.

Please do not eat raw dough — sourdough or otherwise!

Mark Shepard is the author of several books on simple living, nonviolent social change, and the flute, as well as children’s books under the name Aaron Shepard. He first learned to love sourdough in 1979 while visiting the Community of the Ark,

a utopian

society founded in France by an Italian disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.

On Mark’s return home,

a friend

taught him how to make sourdough of his own. After years of baking and devouring several loaves a week, he wrote and published the bestselling booklet Simple Sourdough.

Mark now lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and fellow author, Anne L. Watson.

Cookbooks

Smart Yogurt ~ Smart Sourdough ~ Simple Sourdough

Music

How to Love Your Flute ~ Simple Flutes

Alternatives

Gandhi Today ~ The Community of the Ark ~ Mahatma Gandhi and His Myths

Poetry

Songs of Flesh, Songs of Spirit

For updates and more resources,

visit Mark’s Sour Foods

Page at

www.markshep.com/‌sour

Foreword

By Anne L. Watson

Following: Tin figures painted by Anne L. Watson. From the set Medieval Bakery by the German manufacturer Maier, depicting a European bakery of the 1700s. Pewter alloy, at a scale of

30 millimeters

(1.2 inches

, the height of the human figures).

I first encountered sourdough bread when I was a college student in San Francisco.

I thought

of it as restaurant fare, not something I’d consider making

at 

home

.

Not then. Many years later,

I decided

to give it a try.

I ordered

San Francisco Sourdough Starter online and followed the directions.

I don’t

remember the exact procedure, but it was rather like having a pet of some kind stashed in the refrigerator, requiring daily attention and care. Finally,

I got

to make my bread.

It was a complete failure.

Now,

I have

to admit to a bit of vanity about my breadmaking skills. I’ve been making various kinds of yeast bread ever since my sister and I, at ages 14 and 12, discovered a pizza recipe in a kids’ cookbook. So,

I was

more than a little annoyed when that sourdough didn’t work for me.

I threw

out my costly starter and dismissed sourdough as one of those things like puff pastry or dim sum that I was just going to have to buy if I

wanted it.

Then Mark started working on his new approach to sourdough.

I liked

his idea of not coping with a starter stored in the refrigerator, but when I tried the results of his earliest methods,

I liked

my yeast bread better. Months went by, and from time to time, he’d have me taste samples from his experiments. At first, they weren’t impressive. And

then . . .

And then he perfected a technique he describes in this book, his method of no-waste feedings. Suddenly, the bread was delicious — different from the bread I remembered from my student days, but at least that good.

I knew

, though, what an expert he’d become in getting to that point, and I doubted it would work

for me.

But I tried it. The bread was perfect. And I didn’t even have to go to San Francisco

for it.

___________________

Anne L. Watson is the author of the Smart Soapmaking series, the Smart Housekeeping series, and two books on baking with cookie molds, as well as many literary novels and children’s picture books. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her sourdough-making husband. Visit her at www.annelwatson.com.

Getting Started

If you’ve never made sourdough before, you’ll be surprised how simple it can be. And if you have made sourdough before, you may be even more surprised!

Most sourdough recipes lead you through days or even weeks of developing a starter before you can make your bread — and then into a lifetime of maintaining that starter. But this book is based on the belief that all that rigmarole is no longer needed. With modern methods of regulating temperature, and with the easy availability of (gasp!) baker’s yeast, honest-to-goodness naturally fermented sourdough bread can be made from start to finish in less than

a 

day

.

Let me explain. Though sourdough bakers often talk about collecting wild yeast in their starters, what they’re actually trying to collect is a combination of yeast and bacteria —

a special

kind called lactic acid bacteria, named after the main acid they

give 

off

.

If the name lactic acid sounds exotic or intimidating, it doesn’t have to. It’s what creates sourness or tang in sour cream, yogurt, and many other milk products — which is why it’s called lactic, or related to milk. It’s also the main source of sourness in pickles and sauerkraut whenever they’re naturally fermented instead of made with vinegar.

All those foods are produced with bacteria of the same family found in sourdough. And it’s these bacteria, rather than any kind of yeast, that make sourdough what

it is.

In case you have any doubt about that, consider these advantages of making naturally fermented sourdough over making conventional yeast bread:

• Gives the bread a delicious sourness

or 

tang

.

• Weakens the gluten, making it easier to digest for people who might otherwise have trouble

with it.

• Adds acids that slow the digestion of starches, for a lower glycemic index and improved blood sugar response.

• Reduces amounts of antinutrients like phytic acid and lectins, making nutrients in the flour more available

to 

you

.

• Resists spoilage in the baked bread and keeps it fresher longer.

Every one of these advantages is produced chiefly or entirely by the sourdough bacteria, not the sourdough yeast. And the one job that is chiefly handled by the sourdough yeast — making the bread rise — is done as well or better by baker’s yeast.

That being true, why worry about sourdough yeast at all?

A good

part of the labor of traditional sourdough is keeping the yeast going strong in a starter. In place of that, why not focus on nurturing the bacteria and just add a bit of baker’s yeast at the end? Not so strangely, that’s exactly how sourdough is made today in many commercial bakeries!

And there’s more. With yeast out of the equation, it turns out you can get flour to ferment very quickly, even from scratch. So quickly, in fact, you don’t need a starter at all. Just add water to high-quality whole grain flour, keep the mixture at a good temperature for a matter of hours, and occasionally add more flour. You’ll get sourdough every time.

With all the benefits of naturally fermented sourdough, it’s only the hassle of making it that has discouraged home bakers. Well, hassle no more. The age of smart sourdough has arrived.

A Note on the Ebook

In this book, sidebars like this one are set off from the main text by double bars above and below and by use of a different font. This font appears also for other supplementary text, like charts and recipe sketches.

Fractions in the book include halves, quarters, and eighths, as displayed in the row below. If you do not see all three fractions, please try a different font for reading.

½ ¼ ⅛

Sourdough Superstitions

This is not the beginning of the book. If it opened here automatically, please page backward for important information.

Before tackling how to make smart sourdough, let’s demolish some half-truths and outright falsehoods that might stand in our way. (I’ll discuss many of these later in the book in more detail.)

Myth: Sourdough is very sour!

Some sourdough is very sour — for instance, the kind popularly associated with San Francisco. But the sour in sourdough really only means the dough is fermented by lactic acid bacteria. These bacteria produce both acetic acid, which tastes more sour, and lactic acid, which tastes less so — and how you make the bread helps decide the amounts and proportions of these two acids. That’s why, for instance, you’ll hear of the sweet sourdoughs of Italy in contrast to the more sour ones of Germany.

With the

24-hour

process described here, the sourness will be milder and the taste more complex than in a typical San Francisco sourdough. In fact, you might find your bread turns out more tangy than sour. That’s okay, and you may well prefer it! But I’ll also give you simple tips for turning the sourness up or down — and in any case, you’ll get all the benefits of sourdough, including improved taste, however sweet or sour that

may be.

Myth: Sourdough takes a lot

of 

work

!

What takes a lot of work is beginning and maintaining a traditional sourdough starter. But with modern methods of temperature control, plus the judicious use of a tiny amount of baker’s yeast at the end, making naturally fermented sourdough doesn’t require a starter at all. It’s still a bit more work than making regular yeast bread, but the health benefits — and taste! — are well

worth it.

Myth: When you start sourdough, there’s always the risk it will go bad and have to be thrown out.

That’s with traditional sourdough starter, and it’s because the starter is fermenting at around room temperature. The higher temperatures of smart sourdough favor the bacteria you want, so it’s easy for them to overcome their undesirable competitors.

I call this method no-fail because a mixture of high-quality whole grain flour and water at the temperatures I recommend will always go properly sour. There is some risk of it going bad later from being pushed too far, but I’ll teach you how to control that. In fact, since perfecting my recipe,

I have

not had a single batch of sourdough go bad on me, though each and every one has been started from scratch.

Myth: Sourdough is wasteful because you have to discard so much when you

feed it.

Making and maintaining a traditional starter can certainly be wasteful, since you’re typically told to discard as much as half the sourdough before feeding. Of course, you can find other uses for the sourdough you’ve removed, but that can be a hassle in itself.

With smart sourdough, none is discarded. You simply start with a very wet sponge, then let each feeding bring it closer to the moisture content of a finished loaf. No more conflict between conscience and convenience!

Myth: Sourdough was the first risen bread.

This is technically true but also misleading. Sourdough bakers often make this claim to conjure images of ancient bakers nurturing their precious and delicate starters. But that is almost certainly not how bread was first fermented. In a hot and humid climate like in Egypt — where risen bread is said to have first appeared — all you need to ferment dough is to leave it overnight.

Of course, it would have been natural for some Egyptian bakers to start saving a bit of dough from one batch to speed up fermenting in another. But it wasn’t until sourdough moved to the cooler climes of Europe that bakers needed elaborate procedures for developing and maintaining starters. European bakers had no way to maintain the kind of temperatures common where sourdough originated, so they had to come up with alternative methods. This is the approach that bread historians and technologists now call

Type I sourdough.

(That’s a Roman

numeral 1.)

Type I is

what many bakers today think of as the only true sourdough, even though it was dictated only by practical necessity in certain parts of the world at a certain time in history —

a time

that is

now 

past

.

Myth: With sourdough, the starter provides the leavening.

That’s true of

Type I sourdough.

But much of the sourdough sold today — especially by supermarkets and large bakeries — is what we call

Type II

(Roman

numeral 2).

The dough is fermented by sourdough bacteria, but yeast growth is actually discouraged till the end, when baker’s yeast is added for

the 

rise

.

Development of this technology began in the late 20th century. But most home bakers — and cooking writers — have yet to hear of this new approach, much less to absorb its lessons. Though

Type II

itself is an industrial process suited only to large bakeries, this book aims to adapt some of its principles to the home kitchen.

Myth: You need a starter so you don’t have to start your sourdough from scratch each time.

A starter will certainly do this for you, but it no longer matters so much. With modern temperature control, you can easily ferment your flour from scratch in less than a day. You won’t get the traditional balance of yeast and bacteria in that time, but you don’t need to, because you can just add a bit of baker’s yeast at the end. So, you can easily do without a starter.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using a starter.

A starter

can be helpful if you’re making loaves every day or so and want to shorten the time for each one, or if you need to ensure a specific taste — especially a more sour one — or if you just want greater control of your results.

But just to ferment your dough for health and great taste? No, you don’t need one. And for most home bakers, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.

Myth: Bread isn’t truly sourdough unless it’s made only with wild yeast.

This is kind of a joke, because when scientists studied artisan bakeries in different