I think making one's own bread, particularly sourdough, is definitely more daunting to the amateur cook than so many other cooking challenges.
But also very satisfying, I would say.
Regarding the sourdough tang, my understanding is that you can use a sourdough starter just as a rising agent, or you can use much more of it to introduce that tangy flavour. So it may be a case of experimenting with using a lot more starter in the bread, and seeing how that helps develop the flavour.
I'm not sure I've got that right though...
One of the best resources on the web for understanding bread, and understanding what impact all the various ingredients and techniques make, and what happens when you change one element, can I recommend a blog called Azelia's Kitchen?
Amateur baker writing through her learning process, started out as a beginner just like the rest of us, but now knows more than many pro bakers.
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Those loaves look wonderful! My family and I have a great love of sourdoughs, and I've been doing them for a while. First ones came out like bricks, but thankfully with some practise I've managed to get it a lot better. My son now eats it :)

I found that how much of the sour taste you get does tend to depend on the wild yeast you have. My starter is really lazy and I have to rise my sourdough for a day before I get that tangy, sour taste. Wild yeast can vary tremendously, and if you have a lazy strain like mine, refridgerating it and taking it out of the fridge two days before won't have it active enough to do any useful work. I don't tend to stick to the "doubled" in size thing. What I do is to poke the dough, if doesn't feel like my earlobe it's not proved enough. Depending on the dough it might have to expand to well over twice its original size to get to that fluffy stage.

As for the crumb, what I like to do is to make the dough a bit wetter, 65%-70% of water to flour. It's wet enough so that you get the big air holes in it, but the problem comes when you try to bake it. It's wet enough that it'll flow slowly, so if you prove it, and then leave it for a bit, you'll end up with a flat loaf. If however, you prove it, and have your oven hot, stick it in the oven as soon as possible after you've tipped it out of the proving basket, the dough won't get a chance to "flow" out and go flat. The first 10 minutes of baking will solidify it enough so that you'll get a nicely shaped loaf.

I try to not add any flour when I'm kneading my sourdough, because I tend to add too much to help the kneading process and the crumb comes out heavy and dense. I use olive oil instead.

I'm a big fan of your blog. Doing things properly on the cheap is what I'm all about too!

Keep up the good work

Firstly, can I say how much I enjoy your site and in fact it inspired us to start our own blog.

By chance I was recently 'reviewing' i.e. chucking out our recipes cut out of magazines - you know, the ones which pave your way to the kitchen with good intentions - and came across the recipe for sourdough bread copied from the Moro cook book. All 8 pages of it! The starter begins with a bunch of red grapes - wtf!

We normally just stick to a basic loaf and a good description of that is given in Nigel Slater's Appetite.

But I did come across a recipe for a campagne loaf by Raymond Blanc from his Kitchen Secrets and he uses a dough starter which gives it a slight sour dough taste. The recipe describes the techniques very clearly and he makes it in a processor which is very simple. Interestingly he uses cold water. Both recipes are given on our blog.

This water temperature lark gets a bit much too - 30C in the summer, 40c in the winter? A helpful tip I read for getting the right water temperature was to take one third boiling water from your kettle and add two thirds cold water from the tap - voila, water at the right temperature.

Raymond Blanc also recommends heating your oven to 250c or its maximum setting which he says is critical because the temperature drops significantly when you open the door. He bakes them at this for 15 minutes then reduces it to 220c.

For a good crust he says to put a roasting tin in the bottom of your oven to preheat and when you put the bread in chuck 50ml of water into the roasting tray and there you have the steam for your crust. Step away from the spray bottle!

I baked my sourdough this weekend in a cake tin. Left the base in, oiled the tin, let the dough do the 2nd rise in there and just popped it in the oven with a tray of water underneath it. Worked fine!

It was a dense, soft crumb, but I like it that way.

I watched the Hairy Twats in Spain on the box t'other day. Spanish cook had a thermometer which she used to test that the neading had brought the dough temperature up to the required level, which was........nope, it's not there. Good idea though.

Regards, Ian

I was recently treated to a sourdough session given by Stuart Oetzmann of Metfield Bakery in Norwich. As a complete novice it was a bit mind-boggling but he's absolutely passionate. He talked about the problem of the crust getting too hard in a domestic oven, when commercial ones have inbuilt steam. You can get clay cloches but they are a luxury, so I use a quarry tile instead of a pizza tray thing and then cover the loaf with a large upturned stock pot which traps the steam. I take it off for the last 8 mins or so and it seems to work. But I'll have to try some other method if I want to make a long, rather than a round, loaf. I'm not sure I have got the crumb right yet but it doesn't look too different to yours, which is heartening!

Ooos! In my earlier email I put 3g. instant yeast - bad maths, it should be about 1g, i.e.1/4 of a proper measuring spoon.