The Sourdough Bread Bake Off

Your early access to the results 🥇

If you asked me a year ago whether I’d ever do a sourdough bake off, the answer would be a resounding no. I tried making one sourdough loaf during covid (it was bleak—flat and overproofed) and one in 2023 (quite decent! But with enough discarded starter and stress that I didn't feel inspired to try again after) and needless to say, my technique for making soudough simply didn’t feel good enough to do a full bake off.

However, when Christine of the Long Island City sourdough microbakery fame @iloafyoubychristine offered to collaborate on a sourdough bread bake off, that turned my no into an easy yes.

Breaking all the rules with this sourdough bread bake off

Christine prepping 9 different sourdough loaves in her apartment!

During most bake offs, I try to follow the baking instructions to the letter as much as possible. However, we deviated quite a bit in this bake off by standardizing the process of each loaf to use Christine’s method of making sourdough (more details to come in the full blog post).

We made this decision mainly for ease (much easier to streamline the process for 9 different recipes baked in one day) and also because Christine is adamant that sourdough making is so technique-driven. I.e. the proofing times that might work in one person’s kitchen won’t necessarily work in yours—so optimizing each recipe per Christine’s ideal technique for her apartment conditions made sense.

This ultimately means that even though I’ll list the recipes that we used as guidelines below, the ratings are a really a reflection of the recipe ratios rather than the techniques outlined by each recipe developer.

An enormous thanks to Christine for “collaborating” on this bake off with me!! What this really means is I barely touched a single ball of dough—I simply helped mix the doughs and took photos while Christine measured, proofed, stretched and folded, shaped and baked all 9 loaves.

If you live in NYC, definitely keep an eye out for her bread drops from I Loaf You—her freshly baked sourdough and sourdough bagels are a real treat!

The Sourdough Bread Bake Off Results

Below is your premium subscriber bonus sneak peek at the bake off results (the full blog post will be published next week).

One trend that’s clear from the ratings is that tasters generally preferred loaves made with white flour vs. whole wheat flour. Generally I wouldn’t try to compare white loaves vs. whole wheat loaves given the clear flavor difference. But for this bake off, we included a few partial whole wheat loaves since whole grains can speed up fermentation and I was curious if we’d see textural differences.

I kind of regret this decision because I think it gave those loaves a severe flavor handicap but alas! Here are the results: