Flavour & Fire
The Sourdough Journal
Ingredients, Ratios & Hydration
A little more water, and everything about the dough changes.
On paper, a sourdough loaf is made from very little: flour, water, starter and salt. Four ingredients are all you need for a basic loaf. Yet change the balance between them ever so slightly, and the dough can take on an entirely different character.
Sometimes it becomes firmer and easier to handle. Sometimes it turns softer, more extensible and a little more demanding. One dough seems to shape itself almost willingly, while another clings to your hands and asks for a little more patience.
That is why a sourdough recipe is more than a list of ingredients. The ratios give you an idea of the dough you are about to make.
The Four Ingredients
Each ingredient has its own role, but sourdough only really comes together when they work as a whole.
Flour forms the foundation of the dough. It provides starch and proteins, and has a major influence on how much water the dough can absorb and how much structure it can eventually develop.
Water brings everything together. It hydrates the flour, allows gluten structure to develop and has a considerable influence on how firm, soft or supple the dough feels.
Starter brings fermentation into the dough. An active starter also contains flour and water of its own, which means it is not simply something added for fermentation; it becomes part of the final balance of the dough.
Salt brings flavour, but its role does not end there. It also influences the dough’s structure and the pace at which fermentation develops.
None of these ingredients exists entirely on its own. Change one, and the rest of the dough responds.
A Recipe Is a Ratio
Take a simple base dough:
500 g flour
350 g water
100 g starter
12 g salt
At first glance, this looks like a fixed formula. In reality, it describes a particular balance. The amount of water does not exist independently from the amount and type of flour, while the starter adds yet more flour and water to the mix.
That becomes important when you start comparing recipes. Two loaves might contain exactly the same amount of water, yet behave quite differently if the amount or type of flour is different.
A recipe therefore tells you more than what to add. It gives you a starting point for how the dough is likely to behave.
What Does Hydration Mean?
Hydration describes the relationship between water and flour in a dough. The higher the hydration, the more water there is in relation to the flour.
The idea is simple enough. What that water does to the dough is where things become interesting.
A dough with less water will generally feel firmer. It is often easier to pick up, shape and keep in place.
Add more water and the dough becomes softer and, often, more extensible. It may spread more readily and feel noticeably stickier. That can bring its own advantages, but it can also make the dough more demanding to work with.
More water does not automatically mean better bread. It simply means a different kind of dough.
And learning to recognise that difference is part of learning to bake sourdough.
More Water, More Attention to Structure
As hydration increases, dough tends to become softer and less able to hold its shape on its own. Good gluten structure therefore becomes increasingly important.
That structure gives the dough the strength to develop and to retain the gas produced during fermentation. Without enough structure, a highly hydrated dough can easily become slack and spread out, no matter how promising the recipe looks on paper.
This does not mean that a wetter dough simply needs more kneading. The way structure develops depends on a number of things, including the flour you use, how the dough is mixed, how fermentation progresses and how the dough is handled along the way.
Those processes deserve a closer look of their own.
For now, the useful thing to remember is simple:
more hydration does not only mean more water. It also means having enough structure to hold that water.
Flour and Water Work Together
A percentage only tells part of the story.
Not all flour absorbs water in the same way. A dough made with a large proportion of wholemeal flour may behave very differently from one made with a strong white bread flour, even when the calculated hydration is identical. Rye and other flours bring their own characteristics to the mix as well.
That is why a hydration percentage cannot, by itself, guarantee a particular dough consistency.
You can make two doughs with exactly the same flour-to-water ratio and still end up with two very different doughs.
This is one of the reasons sourdough can feel less predictable than the numbers suggest. The ratios give you a starting point, but the ingredients determine how those numbers behave in your kitchen.
Your Starter Counts Too
There is one small detail worth keeping in mind: your starter is itself made from flour and water.
A starter at 100% hydration contains, in simple terms, roughly equal amounts of flour and water. So when you add 100 g of starter to your dough, you are also adding approximately 50 g of flour and 50 g of water.
That becomes important once you start comparing formulas more precisely.
For your first loaf, there is no need to turn this into a mathematical exercise. It is simply useful to know that the numbers written in a recipe do not always tell the whole story.
Later, when you begin working with baker’s percentages and total hydration, these relationships become much easier to see.
And Then There Is Salt
Of all the ingredients, salt may be the easiest one to overlook.
Twelve grams in a whole loaf of dough does not sound like much, yet its effect is noticeable. Salt brings flavour and also influences the properties of the dough and the pace of fermentation.
It is a small part of the formula with a larger role than its weight might suggest.
Again, it is not simply about how much you add, but how that ingredient becomes part of the whole.
What Happens When You Change the Ratio?
The interesting part of a recipe often begins when you make a small change.
A little less water can give you a firmer, more manageable dough. A little more can make it softer and more extensible, while also making it stickier and more dependent on good structure.
That does not mean hydration should be the first thing you change whenever a dough feels wrong. A dough that seems slack, for example, may have been fermented too far, not far enough, or simply be made with a flour that behaves differently with water.
It is tempting to blame a single number when sourdough rarely works quite that way.
The more useful approach is to make small changes, observe what happens and gradually build your own understanding of the dough.
Change One Thing at a Time
As you become more comfortable with sourdough, it becomes tempting to experiment. Perhaps you want to add a little more water, try a different flour or adjust the fermentation time.
Try not to change everything at once.
When you change only the amount of water, you can much more clearly see what that change does to your dough. Change the flour afterwards, and you have another point of comparison.
Over time, this is how a sense for dough develops. Not simply knowing that a recipe has, say, 70% hydration, but knowing how a dough at that hydration tends to feel in your own kitchen.
That knowledge is not found entirely in the numbers.
You see it in the dough.
You feel it in your hands.
And, eventually, you begin to recognise it sooner.
From Formula to Dough
A recipe is an excellent place to begin. It gives you something to work from and makes it possible to repeat a particular formula when you want to.
But sourdough is not a copy machine.
Flour changes. Temperatures change. Your starter changes. Even the same formula can behave differently from one day to the next.
That is why it helps to understand ratios without treating them as absolute rules. They give you a language for describing your dough and a way of keeping track of what changes when you alter the recipe.
The numbers give you the starting point.
The dough tells you what happened along the way.
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A little more water, and everything about the dough changes.