- Baking expert Nancy Silverton recommends letting flour and water rest for about 20 minutes before adding sourdough starter and salt.
- The rest gives the flour time to absorb water, while adding salt later lets fermentation begin before salt slows it down.
- Silverton’s broader advice: be patient, keep your starter healthy and change one thing at a time when troubleshooting.
Sourdough can have a reputation for being finicky, but renowned chef and baker Nancy Silverton has a surprisingly simple piece of advice for making a better loaf: Don’t add everything at once.
During a recent sourdough master class with Silverton and Jon Davis of La Brea Bakery, timed to the launch of La Brea Bakery’s new Sourdough Starter Kit Collection on TikTok Shop, Silverton demonstrated a technique that starts with just two ingredients: flour and water. Before adding starter or salt, she lets the mixture sit for about 20 minutes.
The reason is simple: Give the flour time to absorb the water before adding the other ingredients. This rest can help the dough develop and prepare it for the next steps.
What is the flour-and-water rest?
The technique starts by combining flour and water and allowing them rest before adding the ingredients that kick fermentation into gear. Silverton explained that the goal is to “blend the water and the flour together first because we want the flour to absorb the water,” giving it time to “sort of expand and absorb.”
Davis added that the rest allows the flour to absorb more water, “which promotes a better bread.” Silverton noted that this wasn’t a technique she used when she first started baking, but one she later learned from other bakers and incorporated into her process. She recommends letting the flour and water sit for about 20 minutes before adding starter, salt, or anything else.
How to do Nancy Silverton’s sourdough technique
- Start by mixing your flour and water together, leaving out both the starter and salt. Let the mixture rest for about 20 minutes so the flour has time to absorb the water before the rest of the ingredients are introduced.
- Next, add your sourdough starter and mix it into the dough. Salt comes last. Davis explained that they use a “delayed salt method,” adding the salt after incorporating the starter.
- From there, continue with the rest of your sourdough recipe, including mixing, proofing, shaping, scoring, and baking.
La Brea Bakery’s new TikTok Shop collection is designed to make that process a little more approachable for home bakers. The lineup includes a dry sourdough starter, a starter-and-flour set, a baking tools kit and an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven. The tools kit includes a starter jar, dough whisk, bread sling, lame, proofing basket and scraper. Prices range from $7.99 for the starter to $79.99 for the Dutch oven.
Why the timing can improve your bread
The flour-and-water rest gives the flour time to hydrate, but the timing of the salt matters, too. Silverton explained that salt helps control starter and yeast activity, so delaying it slightly gives fermentation a brief head start before the salt slows it down.
And while 20 minutes may feel like another waiting period in an already slow recipe, patience is something Silverton repeatedly emphasized when it comes to sourdough. The biggest mistake first-time sourdough bakers make? “I think for me it's not having the patience,” she said. “A lot happens, but you don't have to be there watching it happen. And you need to let that bread, the dough, or the process go through it.”
More tips for better sourdough
Don’t expect your first loaf to be perfect. Silverton said another mistake is “thinking that you can make one loaf of bread and it should be perfect and it’s not.” Instead, she says, improvement comes through repetition.
Change one thing at a time. If you’re troubleshooting, avoid dramatically changing several variables at once. Silverton recommends making a “small amount of changes, [and] each time documenting them,” so you can actually tell what worked and what didn’t.
Keep your starter healthy. Davis called a good, healthy starter “the key to everything,” adding, “if that's not healthy, nothing's going to turn out.” If you bake infrequently, starter can be refrigerated, though it may need a feeding cycle or two to regain strength before baking.
Use a Dutch oven. Silverton recommends baking crusty bread in a Dutch oven because it traps moisture, helping create the steam that allows the bread to rise and develop its crust.
Don’t score bread just for looks—it plays a crucial role. Silverton described scoring as a “roadmap for how your dough is going to grow in the oven.” Without that roadmap, she explained, the loaf can simply “blow out on the side.”
Ultimately, Silverton’s advice for sourdough is less about finding a shortcut than knowing when to intervene and when to leave the dough alone. Like many things, it’s all about giving it time and being patient.
