SourTube: An Easy 80% Hydration Country Loaf (feat. Veena Azmanov)

📺 SourTube pick: This is a curated video — we didn't make it, we just love it and think you will too. All credit belongs to the creator below. Watch it, learn from it, then go show them some love.

Today's pick: Sourdough Loaf Bread (80% Hydration)

Creator: Veena Azmanov — cook, baker, and former cake decorator behind veenaazmanov.com, where she shares dependable, technique-driven recipes built for real kitchens. Her style is calm, no-nonsense, and relentlessly practical.
Watch on YouTube: Sourdough Loaf Bread (80% Hydration)
More from Veena: find her on YouTube at @VeenaAzmanov_Kitchen and her full recipe collection at veenaazmanov.com for more technique-driven baking.

If the embed doesn't load, watch it directly on YouTube here.

Why we picked this one

Raise your hand if the words "high hydration" make your palms sweat. 🙋 An 80% hydration dough is wet, jiggly, and — if we're being honest — kind of terrifying the first time it flops out of the bowl. But here's the thing nobody tells you: high hydration isn't advanced. It's just patient. And this video is the gentlest possible on-ramp to that whole world.

Veena's recipe is beautifully simple: 500g bread flour, 400g water, 100g active starter, 10g salt. That's it. No levain formulas, no overnight pre-ferments with names, no equipment you don't own. She mixes flour and water for a 60-minute rest (hello, autolyse — free gluten development while you drink your coffee), then works the starter and salt in with stretch & folds over two hours. That's the whole "technique." If you can fold a piece of paper, you can do this.

What we love most is her read-the-dough-not-the-clock approach to bulk fermentation. She gives you a real target — the dough should rise about 50–75%, not double — instead of the vague "wait 4 hours" that has ruined a thousand beginner loaves. Plus she shows the cold proof overnight, which is both the easiest way to schedule bread around an actual life AND the secret to a loaf that scores cleanly and springs like crazy in the oven. High hydration with training wheels, and we mean that as the highest compliment.

This one's perfect for you if your loaves have been... fine. Edible. Slightly dense. And you're ready for that airy, creamy, holey-crumb bread you see on the internet — without needing a new personality to get there. Press play, relax, and watch wet dough stop being scary.

What you'll learn

• Hydration math, the painless way: why 80% hydration means 400g water to 500g flour — and why that ratio is the sweet spot between manageable and open-crumbed.
• The slow-rise method: a 60-minute autolyse, gentle stretch & folds every 30 minutes, and a long room-temperature bulk that targets 50–75% rise instead of "double."
• Scoring and steaming for the ear: how a deep 30–45° score and baking straight from the fridge turn that wobbly wet dough into a tall, crackling loaf.

Our two cents to go with it

Two things worth knowing before you press play:

1. Wet hands are your cheat code. High-hydration dough sticks to everything, including your dignity. Dip your hands in water before every stretch & fold and the dough will release like a polite guest leaving a party. Dry hands vs. wet dough is how wrestling matches start — and the dough always wins.

2. Under-proof is better than over-proof with wet dough. An 80% hydration loaf that's slightly under-fermented will still puff up gloriously in a hot Dutch oven. One that's over-fermented spreads into a frisbee and there's no coming back. When in doubt, pull it 30 minutes earlier than your gut says — the oven spring will do the rest.

And if watching this makes you want to bake a gloriously jiggly 80% hydration loaf — but the "active starter" part has you doing a mental inventory of sad jars in your fridge — that's the exact headache ours was built to solve. Ours arrives dehydrated, wakes up in days with dead-simple instructions, and settles into the kind of reliable rhythm that makes videos like this actually doable. Grab your Squirrelly Girl Starter here 🐿️

Loved this video? Go tell Veena — like and subscribe on YouTube so she keeps making them.

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