Make Bread with Apple Sourdough Starter | An excellent fall bread

It’s fall, and it’s time to go back into the kitchen and make some good food, and what’s better than bread? But wait a minute, you threw out your starter, or you never go around to make one. Making one involves a lot of feeding, flour and water weight, and stuff. Well, Foodgeek to the rescue. This is my article about how to make bread with apple sourdough starter.

What’s an apple sourdough starter, and how do you make it? Well, it’s super simple. Basically just purée the apples and leave them on your kitchen counter for 5 days or so, and it’ll be ready to bake bread.

If you are just here for the recipe, you can press the button underneath to be automagically transported to the recipe:

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The dough in this bread with apple sourdough starter

Vitals

Total weight	1395 grams
Pre-fermented flour	0%
Hydration	80.2%
Yield	2 loaves of apple starter bread

Dough

The dough in this sourdough is made with 80% bread flour and 20% Øland wheat. If you want you can replace the Øland, you can use any whole-grain flour that you like, even gluten-free.

The hydration of the dough is 80%, which may be way too much for whatever bread flour you are using. If you’re new at baking and you’re maybe you are substituting with all-purpose flour, I’d recommend you try out 65% hydration. If the dough feels dry, you can always add more water.

The video gives the details about how to scale the water, but you can also use my Bread Calculator listed below.

You don’t need a sourdough starter for this bread, because we are making one with apples instead. The result will still be amazing bread.

The inoculation of the starter is 25%, which is a bit higher than usual. The apple starter is not AS powerful as a flour starter but will leaven your bread perfectly.

Weight	Ingredient	Baker's Percentage
600g	bread flour	80%
150g	øland wheat	20%
15g	salt	2%
440g	water	58.7%
190g	apple starter	25.3%

If you want to play around with the recipe: change hydration, quantity, or inoculation, you can do so here in my Bread Calculator.

The conclusion of this apple sourdough starter bread

So as I made this bread, I had never made an apple starter bread before, so I didn’t know what to expect, but here’s my opinion:

The crust smells delicious and is super crispy. It’s deeply caramelized but doesn’t have the bitter notes, you can usually smell on a loaf of sourdough bread. The smell of the crumb is slightly sour, but once you eat it you are surprised by how it tastes. There are almost no sour notes.

The smell is wonderfully pleasant, very bready and there are some sweet notes on the smell. You cannot detect any apple, though.

The crumb is relatively tight, but that’s to be expected with that amount of whole grain, and you can use 100% bread flour if you want lighter bread.

It’s great. If you like wonderful bread, this is the bread for you. Even if you’ve had sourdough you felt was too sour, this may be the one to convert you.

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