Ingredients:

Sourdough starter.

White flour.

Salt.

Water.

Olive oil.

Accessories:

A Dutch oven/ heavy casserole dish.

A bowl.

Baking paper.

Measuring cups. 1 cup and 1/2 cup.

The blab:

It's become traditional to start online recipes with 6 pages of nonsense about your grandfather's love for bread, and his early experience in the mines. I'm not going to do that, but I am going to quickly explain how I came up with the recipe.

I got bored.

I got bored with recipes that start with feeding your starter 6 times, measuring everything to fractions of a gram, spending an entire day nursing a single loaf. I thought that people have always been people throughout history. We don't change that much. Nobody likes bad bread, and, for example, the pioneer household probably didn't have time for Mrs Pioneer to babysit a single loaf all day.

So I stripped as much as I could out of recipes until they didn't work, and added just enough back until they did.

The method:

The night before.

Take your starter. Put half in the bowl. Feed the starter and put it away again.

Add 3.5 cups of water to the starter in the bowl and mix. I whisk it, it's faster.

Add 4 cups of flour. Mix, cover, ignore until tomorrow.

Baking day.

Add 4 cups of flour.

Add 1 teaspoon of salt.

Add roughly a serving spoon of oil.

Mix. It should be slightly dry and difficult to work the last bit of flour in. If it's wet, add flour 1/2 a cup at a time until it hits that point.

Cover, ignore for an hour.

Stretch and fold the dough. Wait 20 minutes and repeat. Wait another 20 minutes and do it again.

You should now have a smooth and silky dough.

Form into a round and set it on the baking paper. Twist all 4 corners up as a poor man's banneton. Cover, leave until doubled in size.

Baking.

Put the Dutch oven in the cold oven.

Heat until 250C

Uncover bread and slash.

Quickly remove the Dutch oven, put the dough in, still in the paper and put the lid on.

Give 20 minutes at 250C while covered.

After 20 minutes remove the lid, throw a cup of water into the oven and give a further 17 minutes, still at 250C.

The last few minutes need an eye and a nose. If it's burning, take it out and knock test it.

Remove. Cool. Eat.