42 sourdough bread recipes

Old-fashioned milk-and-flour sourdough starter with no commercial yeast. Two ingredients capture wild bacteria for tangy bread. Patience required.

Old-fashioned potato sourdough starter: a yeast-and-flour starter fed with raw potato for biscuits, breads, and pancakes. Pioneer-style starter that improves with age.

Green peppercorn bread: a rustic German rye and wheat sourdough flavored with green peppercorns soaked in apple juice. Earthy, fragrant, faintly peppery, made the traditional leavened way.

Grape starter for sourdough bread uses wild yeast from red grape skins to build a tangy, fruity base with just flour and water. A 6-day fermentation process creates a living starter you can maintain for months.

Plain sourdough starter made from just flour and water. No commercial yeast needed. Mix, wait four to five days, and you have a wild-fermented base for bread.

Traditional German rye sourdough starter (Sauerteig): a three-phase rye flour and water leaven built over 3 days for authentic German rye bread baking. Maintainable and long-keeping.

Herman starter, the friendship sourdough-style yeast and milk starter that bakers have been passing along for generations. Mix once, feed every five days, and share cups with friends or bake into coffee cakes and breads.

Dad's Saxon yeast is a heritage homemade yeast cake recipe from Transylvanian Saxon tradition, made by boiling hops, fermenting with rye flour, then drying into preserved cakes for bread baking. Old-world sourdough-adjacent craft.

Potato flake sourdough starter: a simple three-ingredient base of water, sugar, and instant potato flakes left to ferment for 3 to 4 days. The sweet, old-fashioned starter used in friendship bread and soft white loaves.

Yeasty sourdough starter is the shortcut version: unbleached flour, a packet of dry yeast, and water mixed into a thick batter and left warm for a day. A fast track to bread baking when you don't want to wait two weeks for a wild starter.