Easy Homemade Sourdough Bread Bowls Recipe for Soup

These sweet homemade sourdough bread bowls are the perfect accompaniment to your favorite soup! 

Sometimes towards mid-winter when we’re all getting a little tired of cold weather and the constant pot of soup in the fridge is getting a little dreary, sourdough bread bowls can go a long way towards bringing some excitement back to the dinner table. My family loves to see the cute little vessels on their plates when they gather around the table. They make for a beautiful table setting and turn a simple meal into a special moment. 

If you’re on your own sourdough journey and are looking for a great new sourdough recipe that’s both delicious and functional, give these sourdough bread bowls a try. They are sweet to shape, quick and easy to bake, and so much fun to serve! 

Why You’ll Love This Sourdough Bread Bowl Recipe

Sourdough is So Good for You

Baking with a wild yeast starter enhances the nutrition of your bread by breaking down the grains before you consume them. This makes them easier for your belly to digest and allows your body to absorb more nutrients. Fill your  sourdough bowls with a hearty soup full of vegetables and good broth, and you’ll have a winning dinner!

Minimal Hands-on time

It takes a day or two to finish this bread bowl recipe, but the amount of hands-on time is very little. I designed this recipe to work around my life which means long stretches of time when the dough is sitting in a bowl minding its own business. No matter what your schedule looks like, you have time to make great bread!

Simple Ingredients

This recipe calls for four simple ingredients: Sourdough starter, water, salt, and bread flour. I’m always amazed by how these basic and economical ingredients can create something so filling, nutrient dense, and delicious. 

Functional 

Bread bowls take a simple pot of soup and turn it into a filling dinner. Sometimes when you’re baking sourdough bread each week and are trying to maintain your starter, it can be challenging to find ways to use up all of that bread. Mix it up a little and add in this new recipe to get more mileage out of your sourdough skills!

Baking With a Sourdough Starter

If you are new to baking with a sourdough starter, you may be surprised by the amount of time required to make a loaf of bread. My advice is to embrace this, lean on it. While at first it may test your patience, eventually you’ll grow to love how much flexibility this gives you. 

You’ll want to make sure your starter is nice and active before making your bread bowls. About 12 hours before you want to bake, feed your starter with equal parts water and flour. For example: 100 grams flour and 100 grams water). The final consistency should be similar to pancake batter. Make sure there are no dry clumps of flour. If you mix it together and it seems thin, just add a bit more flour. Too thick, add a bit more water. When feeding your starter, make sure you double the volume so that the natural yeast has enough food to sustain it for 12 hours. 

Tips for Feeding Your Starter

1. Always make sure your starter is kept in a container large enough to allow it to quadruple in size. When you feed it, you will double the volume. Over the next 8-12 hours, it will double again in size. I keep my starter in a quart sized, wide mouth mason jar.
2. Always add enough flour and water to double the volume of the starter. This ensures your wild yeast has enough fresh food to sustain it for 12 hours.
3. Sourdough starter should be the consistency of thick pancake batter.
4. If you feed the starter only as much volume as you need for your recipe, your starter will never have to discard. Example: I need 200 grams of starter to make a loaf of sourdough bread. If I feed my starter 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour, I will have 200 grams to use in my bread recipe and will end up with the same amount of starter that I had before I fed it. 

Mixing the Ingredients for Sourdough Bread Bowls

Homemade sourdough bread bowls are made similarly to the traditional sourdough method. This sourdough bread recipe contains four simple ingredients: an active sourdough starter, flour, water, and salt. I start by adding my active starter to a large bowl and then pouring in the water. Using a fork, Danish Whisk, wooden spoon, or my hands, I mix the two together until the starter begins to break up. Add the salt, give it a stir, and then add the flour. 

Mix everything together with your hands until the flour is fully incorporated and you have a shaggy dough. For best results you will want to use bread flour to give your bread bowls a better texture and rise. All-purpose flour does not have the gluten strength to rise as well. If the dough feels tough, or there are dry bits of flour, add an additional splash of water. Cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap or a damp towel and set the dough aside for one hour. As it sits, the flour will continue to absorb water and the dough will become more pliable and elastic. 

Side note: If you do not have a kitchen scale, I can’t recommend one enough. When you weigh out your ingredients, there are no measuring cups to fuss with or wash, everything simply goes in one bowl to be mixed together. While I try to keep my kitchen knick-knacks to a minimum, I love investing in solid pieces that I will rely on every day and a kitchen scale falls into this category.

Stretch and Fold Method

Stretching and pulling the dough is an efficient way to activate and strengthen the gluten and is so much easier than kneading! To do this, start with one side of the dough. Grab the edge of the dough working with wet hands, and stretch it up towards you. I like to anchor the dough with my left hand and pull it up with my right. Stop pulling if you feel like the dough is about to break. Fold the dough back over and press it into itself. Turn the bowl a quarter turn and repeat this process for a total of 5-6 times. 

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel and allow your dough to rest at room temperature for thirty minutes. You will perform this series of stretch and folds twice more every thirty minutes. Each time you’ll notice that the dough becomes a little smoother and more pliable and by the last time you’ll have a beautiful and supple, smooth dough.

Bulk Fermentation

After your last stretch and fold, your bread dough is ready for the first rise which will take 4-6 hours, or until it has increased in size by about 50 percent. You’ll know your dough has completed the bulk rise when you see air bubbles forming under the outside of the dough. When you press on the dough it should feel light and full of air. At this point, we are ready to shape our dough into individual sized loaves!

Note: If you’re running short on time and can’t finish the recipe in one day, you can throw the dough in the fridge after the first rise to slow down the process. When you are ready to bake your bread bowls, pull your dough out of the fridge and divide it into four pieces. Shape your bread bowls and complete the final rise. Depending on the temperature of your kitchen, you may want to add up to two hours to the second rise in order for the cold dough to reach room temperature. 

Shaping your Sourdough Bread Bowl

When you’re ready to shape your bread dough, dump it out of the mixing bowl onto a lightly floured surface. You’ve just spent ten hours trying to incorporate air into your dough, so we want to be very careful that we don’t squash that air out as we shape it!  Use a dough scraper to divide the dough into four even pieces. Take the first piece of dough and gently pat it into a rough rectangle and shape your bread bowl using four folds. I start at the back and carefully lift with two hands and fold the back edge 2/3rds over the dough, like and envelope fold. Gently press the edge into the dough to seal. Repeat this with the left edge, then the right edge. 

Finish by folding the bottom edge all the way across the dough, flipping it seam side down in the process. Use the edges of your hands to gently pull the bowl towards you in a circular shape, to seal the seam and create more surface tension. The more surface tension you can build, the better the oven spring will be. Continue until you have a nice round loaf. Repeat with the remaining three pieces.

Final Rise

For the final proof, line four soup bowls or cereal bowls with tea towels or cloth napkins. Dust each tea towel with flour and place a formed dough ball upside down into each lined bowl. Allow to rise for 2-3 hours until it passes the poke test: when you make an indention in the dough with your finger, it should spring back slightly. If the dough springs back all the way, it is under proofed. If it collapses under your finger, it is over proofed. 

Note: If you’re running short on time and can’t finish the recipe in one day, you can throw the dough in the fridge after the first rise to slow down the process. When you are ready to bake your bread bowls, pull your dough out of the fridge and divide it into four pieces. Shape your bread bowls and complete the final rise. Depending on the temperature of your kitchen, you may want to add up to two hours to the second rise in order for the cold dough to reach room temperature. 

Baking your homemade bread bowls

When I’m making a large loaf of sourdough bread, I always bake in a Dutch oven to trap steam and help the loaf rise. However, these little sourdough bread bowls do not fit well into a Dutch oven, and I don’t have time to bake them one at a time! So, this is how I make my bread bowls: it’s an easy and low fuss open bake and works great! Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Fill a spray bottle with water. We’re going to use this to generate some steam that will prevent the crust from forming before the bread has had a chance to rise in the oven.

Once the oven is preheated, line a baking stone or cookie sheet with parchment paper. Flip each bread bowl onto the prepared baking sheet, leaving 2-3 inches of space between each. Score your loaves as desired (a simple “x” is perfect!). Slide the pan into the preheated oven before spraying the top of each little bread bowl with water and closing the oven door. Easy Peasy. Set the timer for 20 minutes and walk away. The little loaves are done when they have a beautiful golden brown finish and an internal thermometer measures 200 degrees. 

Prepping your Sourdough Bread Bowl for Soup

Let your sourdough bread bowls cool completely before prepping them for soup. Use a serrated knife to slice a lid off of each bread bowl. Remove the lid and pull out the insides of the bread bowls, leaving room for a serving of soup. A good bread bowl has a 1/2 inch wall to make sure the soup doesn’t leak through! I pull out the bread with my fingers. Fill with your favorite soup and enjoy!

Looking for a creamy soup to fill up your bread bowls? Check out our One Pot Broccoli Cheddar Soup (Our Favorite!)

Handy Tools

Kitchen Scale

Danish Whisk

Bench Scraper

My Favorite, Most Beautiful Mixing Bowl

Dutch Oven

Thermapen

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