I’ve baked bread for a while but always was intimidated to try sourdough, until now.

In fact, once I got the starter chugging along, it was ridiculously easy, so I thought I’d share the joy.

To get the best flavor, and to accommodate the “no knead” part of the equation, the dough needs to rise about 12 or so hours. This means you need to think about this as a day-long gig (or better still, overnight) but as you’ll see in the videos, the actual hands-on part amounts to only about 15 minutes. Truly, and that includes clean up. Think of it as a really terrific babysitting job, where the baby slept the whole time and you only needed to let the dog in and out a couple of times, and they paid really well.

Here’s the list of ingredients I used this time:

• 1 cup (5 oz.) organic rye flour
• 2 1/2 cups (11 oz.) organic unbleached white flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. sea salt
• 1 tbsp. caraway seeds
• 1 1/2 cups lukewarm water (use spring, well, bottled or Brita-filtered water: yeastie beasties don’t care for chlorine)
• 1/4 cup well-fed and active sourdough starter

I realize that the whole “sourdough starter” piece of this will probably be foreign to some, so if enough of you are interested, let me know in the Comments section here, and this week I’ll tape and post a video on where to find some starter starter (hint: I’ll figure out how to mail you some) how to start it, and how to keep one alive and healthy for when the urge strikes.

If you try it, share! We’d love to hear how it went for you.