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It may not be April 2020 any more (thank God) but, five years since the start of the pandemic kickstarted our love of baking sourdough, it’s safe to say we’re still addicted. The UK spent £58.5m on sourdough in the year to March 2024, according to Kantar data. With some particularly posh loaves costing as much as £24.40 (bonjour, Poilâne Bakery in Belgravia), it’s easy to see how.
Making your own sourdough is a fabulously grounding, satisfying, patience-building pursuit, and it’s also a smart investment if you’re already munching heaps of the bought-in stuff. The thought of starting a starter may give you lockdown flashbacks, but it’s easy to incorporate into a busy (read: normal, sane) schedule with significantly less hands-on time than you might think once you get the hang of it.
Here are all the bits you’ll need to get started, and the things you don’t need to waste your money on. Enjoy the journey – it’s magic.
Sourdough essentials
Good flour
Everything begins with the flour. To get started you’ll need strong white bread flour, rye flour and strong wholemeal flour. Quality is crucial: sourdough made with basic supermarket flour will be … basic. It simply won’t look or taste anywhere near as good as loaves made with high-quality grain.
The most charming thing to do, obviously, is to find your own local wheat farmers and mills and support them. Failing that, Shipton Mill is a favourite with UK bakers for producing various consistently reliable flours. Wildfarmed – or as I like to call it, Rave Flour, because it was founded by Andy Cato, 50% of Groove Armada – is increasingly popular for its regenerative backstory.
Wessex Mill has several interesting, seeded and flavoured flours often available in delis and supermarkets, but my personal favourite is NR Stoate & Sons in Dorset, whose stoneground malted bread flour, Maltstar, is almost sinfully delicious. Then there’s Gilchesters Organics, a heritage grain farm that supplies flour to Coombeshead Farm bakery. You’ll also need a bag of millet or brown rice flour for dusting bannetons (baskets) to prevent dough from sticking – Shipton Mill sells both.
Incidentally, the more flour you have in your kitchen, the more wild yeast there will be flying around the air, and the more active your sourdough starter will be. Just watch out for bugs: flour mites, weevils and pantry moths (shudder) love munching on grain, so keep flour in sealed containers and check them regularly for anything, ahem, wriggly.
Gilchesters Organics unbleached white strong wheat flour
From £3.50 at Gilchesters Organics
NR Stoate & Sons Maltstar flour
From £3.58 at NR Stoate & Sons
A jam jar
Sourdough sounds complicated, but making a sourdough starter couldn’t be simpler. Truly. It’s just a case of mixing a small amount of flour with a small amount of water, leaving it alone for 24 hours, and repeating that process a few times until you see bubbles, which should be in three or four days. And all you need to do this in is a clean jam jar with a lid.
You don’t need a fancy jar, you don’t need a fancy spoon, and you don’t need to cover the top in gauze lest the yeasts can’t get in through the lid. Don’t panic – the yeasts will be fine. A Bonne Maman 370g jam jar – jam eaten, jar washed, lid on loosely – is perfect. A pickle or kimchi jar is also ideal; Eaten Alive ones are the perfect size, and imbuing your starter with the scent of spiced fermented cabbage can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned. If you want to go slightly fancy, a Weck 850ml jar with a glass lid – seal and clasps removed just in case your starter wishes to keep expanding until the jar explodes, which genuinely will happen – will probably look the poshest on your kitchen island, if posh-looking kitchen islands are your jam.
Bonne Maman strawberry conserve, 370g
£3.30 at Ocado
£3.30 at Sainsbury’s
Weck 850ml jar
Weighing scales
Baking isn’t the same as cooking, pals, and while too little salt in a stew is a rectifiable slip-up, too little salt in a batch of sourdough can leave you with a pancaked brick that has only one destiny: the compost heap. A trusty set of digital weighing scales will ensure you measure all your ingredients – especially the salt – accurately. Once you decide it’s time to open your own micro-bakery – heck, why not, everyone else is doing it – an industrial-grade scale can measure weights of up to 15kg.
Lakeland weighing scales
£19.99 at Lakeland
£19.99 at Amazon
Industrial bench scale
£190.78 at Nisbets
£135.95 at Amazon
Dough scrapers
When it comes to dough scrapers, you want two of these little tools: a curved plastic one for scraping down your mixing bowl, and a straight metal one for cutting, shaping and handling your dough, and scraping down your workbench afterwards. The more sourdough you make, the more nimble you’ll be with them. Sourdough dough dries and hardens, sticking like cement to absolutely anything. Be rigorous about cleaning up as you go or you’ll end up with rock-hard doughy gubbins all over your kitchen worktops, floors, walls and – if you’re a particularly flamboyant baker – ceiling.
Curved scraper
£9.99 for five at eBay
£2.96 at Amazon
Stainless steel scraper
Bannetons
Once you’ve mixed, fermented and shaped your sourdough, you need to leave it to rest in something that will hold its shape before you bake it, either at room temperature for a few hours or – ideally, for depth of flavour – overnight in the fridge. Traditionally, this is done in a cane proving basket, also called a banneton, which comes in two shapes, round and oval, and many sizes, depending on how much your dough weighs. I prefer oval because they’re easier to stack side by side in the fridge if you’re making several loaves simultaneously, and because a long oval loaf makes more sense in terms of sandwiches. It’s a good idea to get two because many recipes yield two loaves.
Oval banneton
£14.38 at Nisbets
£18 at John Lewis
Round banneton
£18 at John Lewis
£21.99 for two at Amazon
A baker’s lame
Once your beautiful, rested dough comes out of the banneton, you’ll need to score it with a blade before it goes in the oven. This helps the loaf rise in an orderly fashion – ie upwards. If you don’t score it, the gases will find their own weak point to escape from – often at the base of the dough, giving your loaf a funny sort of foot as it bakes. A knife won’t work for this job – you need a baker’s lame, which is essentially a razor blade on a stick. Many lames come with a pack of razor blades, which will see you through many bakes.
Walfos lame and six razor blades
Steel lame
£24.95 at Rackmaster
£41.98 at Etsy
A Dutch oven
The best way to make sourdough that looks like it’s emerged from a bakery is to bake it inside a Dutch oven. You can use any cast-iron casserole pot that holds about 5 litres, but what you really want is one with a flat lid so you can flip the whole thing upside down, lay and score your dough in the shallower lid, and reduce the likelihood of you either mangling your precious dough baby as you drop it into the hot pot or – more importantly – burning yourself. A Lodge pan is my go-to – I have four and stack them across two ovens when I cook several loaves at once.
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Lodge cast iron Dutch oven
£114.99 at Lakeland
£81.65 at Amazon
Our Place cast iron Perfect Pot
£135 at Fenwick
£145 at Our Place
Nuovva enamelled cast iron bread pot
£79.99 at Nuovva
£79.99 at Amazon
Heat-resistant gloves
You’re going to be heating these Dutch ovens to about 250C inside your oven and letting them preheat for an hour or so, so let me tell you (from scalding experience) that tea towels and granny’s oven mitts ain’t gonna cut it. Some heavy-duty heat-resistant baker’s gloves – often called barbecue gloves – are your new best friends. You’ll also be able to handle the dough, the lame, the pot and the cooked loaf with more precision and in much less of a flap if you’re wearing gloves for the whole process. American Ove Gloves are perfect – not too long or thick, and easy to slip on and off – as are the similar ones from Coopers of Stortford.
Oven gloves
£12.99 at Coopers of Stortford
£11.99 at eBay
A good toaster
Imagine the insanity of pulling your beautiful, burnished, crackling-to-the-point-of-singing homemade loaf from the oven, only to have to hack it into wafer-thin half slices to fit it in a measly British toaster when you want it for breakfast the next day. Come on. The only toaster in any self-respecting sourdough baker’s kitchen should be the Dualit Long Slot Lite toaster with extra wide 36mm slots, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.
Dualit Long Slot Lite toaster
£129.99 at John Lewis
£129.99 at Dunelm
Proper butter
It’s an insult to the farmer who grew the wheat and, frankly, yourself to spend three days making sourdough and then slather it in supermarket butter. What you want on your special bread is tandsmør levels of joyful creaminess. Treat yourself to Fen Farm Dairy’s raw cultured Bungay Butter, the preposterously creamy stuff from Ampersand Dairy, or some of that really sexy unpasteurised butter from Normandy Isigny Sainte-Mère, which you can get at Ocado. Heck, once you’re this far down the rabbit hole, just make the butter yourself. All you need is the best double cream money can buy, salt, a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and lots of clingfilm. Lots. Seriously, trust me on the lots.
Bungay cultured raw butter, 200g
£7.50 at Dukes Hill
£11.30 at the Fine Cheese Co
Ampersand cultured raw butter, 210g
£7.50 at Farmfetch
£7.50 at Dukes Hill
A good bread knife
Proper sourdough requires a proper instrument to slice through that delectably golden outer crust and that sticky, squidgy interior without squashing it flat or driving you wild with frustration. You need a long, sturdy, serrated knife: Kitchen Provisions sells a beautiful, extra-long, 36cm Japanese bread knife. I’m partial to a trusty Victorinox Swiss classic bread knife, which is strong, easy to handle, and will stay sharp for years with no sharpening.
Japanese bread knife
From £38 at Kitchen Provisions
Victorinox Swiss classic bread knife
£33 at Victorinox
£25.62 at Amazon
A decent book
Everyone has a totally different way of making sourdough, and if you read all the books and listen to all the experts at once, your brain will surely explode with conflicting numbers and timings and flour types and temperatures. The best thing to do, at the start of your journey, is to pick a side and stick to it. The book I learned from is Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson, owner of the legendary San Francisco bakery, but The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo, author of the award-winning sourdough blog of the same name, is also a bit of a bible. The Dusty Knuckle has written a book based on everything learned by running the killer bakery in east London, as has Michelle Eshkeri, owner of north London’s beloved Margot Bakery, in her book Modern Sourdough.
Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson
£20.87 at Amazon
£30 at Blackwells
The Perfect Loaf by Maurizio Leo
£30.36 at WHSmith
£24.98 at Amazon
Don’t bother with …
A thermometer
If you want to get super-duper science class about making sourdough, sure, get a probe thermometer (nothing I’ve used beats a Thermapen). However, it’s not initially necessary, will make you stressed even thinking about making sourdough in the winter, and can prevent you from developing innate sourdough instincts, which is the key to bread-baking becoming second nature.
Shower caps
Covering your dough with a shower cap while it proves to stop it from drying out is unnecessary. Bakeries aren’t covering 200 loaves with shower caps every night before they close their fridges and, what’s more, a little bit of dryness at the top of the dough will stop it from sticking to your gloves when you scoop it out of the banneton to bake.
A proving machine
Unless you live in an igloo, there should always be a warm enough spot in your house to make sourdough, even in the dead of British winter. It could be simply near a radiator or inside a switched-off oven with the light on. Yes, sourdough will ferment, grow and prove faster in the summer and slower when it’s cooler, but there are ways to speed things up when it’s cold, such as using hot water or adding more sourdough starter to your mix. If you do live in an igloo, here’s a Brod & Taylor proving machine you can try.
Martha de Lacey is a freelance writer and sourdough baking teacher, now on a baby-based in-person teaching hiatus, from which she is soon to emerge. You can find out about future classes or sign up for her online sourdough baking course at marthadelacey.com
