Easy High Protein Sourdough Bread

Imagine a homemade sourdough bread that not only boasts that signature crispy crust, beautiful open crumb, and the rich, complex flavor of slow fermentation, but also packs a powerful protein punch.
This Easy High Protein Sourdough Bread is exactly that – your new go-to recipe that elevates your everyday loaf. It offers over 50% more protein than a classic sourdough, with the added benefit of enhanced bioavailability. That’s right, sourdough isn’t just about taste; it also helps break down proteins into smaller, more easily digestible molecules, giving your body more of the nutrients it needs.

 

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• Why You’ll Love This
• The Ingredients
• Substitutions
• Equipment Used
• How to Make this
• How To Store
• FAQ
• Other Recipes You Might Enjoy

Why You’ll Love This 

TL;DR

• Elevated Sourdough: Get all the classic sourdough goodness – amazing open crumb, crispy crust, and deep flavor.
• Protein Power-Up: Enjoy 50% more protein than a regular loaf, made easier to digest and more bioavailable by sourdough’s natural enzymes.
• Gut-Friendly & Filling: The slow fermentation helps lower the glycemic index, keeping you fuller for longer and making it kinder to your gut.
• Secret Ingredients: We add protein powder and cottage cheese to boost protein and moisture without sacrificing texture.
• Surprisingly Easy: Don’t let the “sourdough” fool you; this recipe is straightforward and achievable for home bakers.
• Protein Powder Tested: I even break down which protein powders work best and how they impact the final loaf.

Simply Excellent Sourdough Bread with Added Protein

Have you ever dreamed of a really good quality, healthy sourdough bread that also has a higher amount of Protein? One even a sourdough beginner can make?
You are not alone! I have too.
So I went ahead and created one. It took me a while I admit, but I finally found a formula that works after a fair few early failures resulting in either too dry or too squishy bread.

While creating my Sourdough Protein Sandwich bread, I found adding just 30g protein powder per roughly 500g flour gives structure, leads to a fantastic rise and doesn’t dry out the dough.

Today, I’m thrilled to share my Goldilocks version of Easy High Protein Sourdough Bread.
After numerous trials and errors – believe me, I’ve had my share of ‘too dry’ and ‘too squishy’ loaves – I finally perfected this formula.
I’ll also give you a detailed comparison of three different protein powders I tested in it.
Spoiler alert: They are all delicious!

Extra Protein and Moisture from Cottage Cheese

Beyond the protein powder (which replaces some of the flour), my main deviation from a classic sourdough is cottage cheese. While whey protein powder can sometimes dry out a loaf, I found that water alone wasn’t quite enough to counteract this. Cottage cheese steps in to provide crucial moisture, and its subtle fat content perfectly balances the added structure from the protein, ensuring a nutrient-dense, crusty, yet tender loaf. Plus, who can argue with more protein?

Why Go Through The Trouble Of Creating a Sourdough Protein Bread?

I have written a whole post on the topic of sourdough baking with added protein last week, including the relevant links to studies and science behind it, but here is the gist of it:

• The sourdough starter contains and produces a wide variety of enzymes, including proteases. These proteases are enzymes that break down protein molecules into smaller peptides and individual amino acids, which our bodies can more easily absorb than their bigger counterparts.
• The process works both on protein within the flour and added whey protein in the form of powder and any other milk or grain products.
• This means you get more bang for your buck from the protein you are adding to sourdough when allowing it to long ferment.

Plus, we all love a good bread, don’t we?
Why not combine it with more of what we need?

Keeps you Fuller for Longer

Have you ever had a carb filled meal that you thought should keep you full, yet two hours later you were hungry again? I sure have.
It’s because of two factors: Pure carbs, especially white flour, shoot up your blood sugar quickly and it drops just as fast, leading to hunger pangs.
Plus the lack of protein, which doesn’t give body the macronutrient it needs as building block.

This bread helps with both issues. The slow fermentation with sourdough leads to a lower glycemic index, meaning your blood sugar rises slower (which is also great news for diabetics), keeping you fuller for longer.

Said slow fermentation also makes this a very gut friendly bread.

The fact that it has about 50% more protein than your average sourdough bread and, by virtue of making it easier available to the body, increase the benefits it gives you.

Curious about the protein difference? Here’s a direct comparison of the protein content in a classic sourdough loaf versus my enhanced version:

Metric	Classic Sourdough Loaf	High Protein Sourdough Bread
Total Weight	985g	1062g
Total Protein	79g	117.4g
Protein Percentage	~8.0%	~15%
Protein per Slice	~5.6g	~7.3g

Easy to Make

You might be surprised how easy to make this sourdough bread recipe is! If you have a blender, a bowl, a spoon (or dough whisk), and a Dutch Oven, you’re well on your way to baking this incredible loaf.

The blender is mainly to blend the cottage cheese into its super smooth and creamy texture, then add the protein powder to get that extra smooth too, ensuring there are no lumps of any kind.

The rest is simply stirring the wet into the dry and giving it a bit of love by adding a few stretch and folds, then leaving it in the fridge overnight.
See, easy!

The Texture

While this loaf certainly delivers the open crumb you expect from a high-quality sourdough, its true magic lies in the overall texture – what I, as someone from Germany, would describe as ‘really good bread.’ I know, that’s highly subjective, so let me explain:
Many artisan sourdough loaves I’ve encountered in Ireland and France, despite their open crumb, often feel ‘unsubstantial’ to me. They might offer a lot of crust, but the interior almost seems to vanish as you bite into it. Some call it ‘melt in your mouth,’ but I find it utterly unsatisfying.

They also dry out really quickly and I keep being frustrated by the butter or any other spread I add on top just escaping through all the large holes.

The bread I’m used to might have a slightly finer crumb (not as many large bubbles, but still enough for a lovely oven spring), and it keeps fresh for days.
The crust offers just the right amount of crunch and resistance to the teeth. Yet you won’t feel as if you are mainly eating crust.

But the inside? That’s the best part! Satisfyingly chewy, toothsome, and has a perfectly moist crumb – not underbaked, just right. You’ll find yourself happily eating it plain, appreciating bread at its finest.

It has flavor. A hint of maltiness coming through ideally. The sourdough not being overpowering, but noticeable with a gentle tang.

And whatever you put on it stays on it.

Toast it on day 3 or 4 and you are rewarded with even more crunch in the crust, yet the middle, while its outsides are toasty, will taste like freshly baked, soft bread.

This protein sourdough bread has all that and more.

Is your mouth watering yet? Mine sure is.

So let’s get baking!

Ingredient Notes

This bread primarily relies on classic sourdough ingredients, enhanced with two key protein components. Here’s a closer look at what you’ll need and why each ingredient is important:

• Bread Flour – Strong bread flour has a higher protein content than all purpose flour and forms a stronger gluten network, responsible for the beautiful open crumb you get in this bread.
• Salt – Not only for flavor (though that’s of course important), but to control the fermentation rate and give it time to develop.
• Cottage Cheese – Part of the protein addition here. Gives a lovely fresh flavor to the bread, increases moisture and introduces a tiny bit of fat, keeping the dough supple even when adding protein powder.
• Protein powder – The other half of the protein increase, the protein powder acts similar to flour in baking, in that it absorbs moisture and lends structure. Too much and you get a very dry loaf. I found 30g on 500g flour to be about the Goldilocks amount. It sounds like very little, but together with the cottage cheese it increases the protein content by about 50%. I will go into which one to use and the differences between them in the next paragraph.
• Sourdough Starter – The key to make this bread work for you. Ideally a well fed and active starter, but I’ve made this with starter that was 2 days unfed, and it worked just fine. No need to obsess about the exact feeding schedule, as long as your starter was fed within the last few days.

What Protein Powder to use?

I was genuinely curious about how various protein powders would affect the dough’s texture and the final loaf. So, I decided to experiment with three distinct types: two very common options and a fascinating vegan wildcard.

Whey Concentrate

This is what I used in all of my recipes that contain protein powder. It can do anything from adding a luscious creamy texture to oatmeal over contributing a good amount of protein to everyone’s favorite sourdough pancakes, all the way to sneakily introducing more protein into popular desserts like Lemon Drizzle cake with zucchini.

Latest after making my Soft Sourdough Sandwich Bread with Protein, I knew it could also be added to bread with great results. So, of course I knew I’d use it in this bread.

For bread I got the unflavored version from MyProtein. This is neither affiliated nor sponsored. Just the powder I found to taste best after trying a fair few. If you never found one you actually enjoy, give this one a try.

Casein Protein Powder

Not everyone has whey protein at home or wants to buy it especially for this bread. So I included Casein, another very common powder that I read was used in baking, in this three-loaf-trial. Casein protein powder has generally less lactose than whey concentrate, yet more than whey isolate. I had never used whey isolate though and despite being lactose intolerant, I don’t have any issues with whey concentrate. If you do, this might be an option.

At this point I should mention that the lactic acid bacteria in sourdough also break down a good amount of any lactose you might have included in your dough. So even those with lactose intolerance might find this bread very gut friendly.

Upcycled Barley Protein

This was the wildcard I introduced in my trials. I found it as vegan version from MyProtein

It contains partially Hydrolysed Protein from Spent Barley and Rice, making it a fantastic vegan option if you’d like to experiment with protein baking.

One downside with this particular one: It only comes flavored. I opted for caramel, which might be…controversial in sourdough bread, but I felt it worked well.

I was particularly keen on trying the barley because I’ve been using diastatic malt powder, which is made from barley as well, in my bread with great success when it comes to flavor and browning, so this was exciting.

If you are curious about the results, keep reading. I will compare all of them at the end.

substitutions

• Bread Flour – You can use all-purpose flour if that’s what you have. Your bread might have a little less structure (read bubbles) and be more tender, but still delicious. If using gluten free flour, you’ll have to add psyllium husk powder to get similar results. About 27g on 500g gluten free flour should be a good starting point.
  Note: I used the calculation from “The Loopy Whisk” and her fantastic gluten free bread recipe.
• I have yet to try this myself (it’s planned), so I’m not entirely sure it’ll come out perfect, but going by my Gluten Free Pistachio Cookie results which I made based on one of her recipes too, it should be pretty good.
• You can also replace about 1/3 of the white flour with whole wheat bread flour without sacrificing much of the texture but might have to add a little more water.
• Cottage Cheese – I have yet to find a vegan source that performs as well as cottage cheese but could imagine vegan Greek yoghurt working in similar ways, if with a little less protein but higher fat content.
• Protein Powder – Casein and spent barley (for vegans) both work well. I compare the results I got below and how I would modify the recipe for each.

If you try any of the above GF or vegan substitutions, I’d love to hear about your results in the comments.

A Note for Those with Mild Gluten or Lactose Intolerance

Sourdough with its ability to break down both gluten and lactose into easier to digest molecules can help alleviate those intolerances when eating slow fermented (mainly homemade) sourdough bread.
Those of you who were on vacation in Europe and noticed you suddenly have no gut problems when eating bread: That was the reason.
Try out this bread and see how you feel after.

Personally I’m lactose intolerant and have no issues whatsoever when eating this bread.

For those with celiac disease: The general advice is still to avoid any gluten. Though you might ask your GP about sourdough bread and he can probably give you a more personalised advice.

Equipment Used

• Blender – As for the equipment you need, the only slightly unconventional piece of equipment is this. I used my Nutribullet, but any blender that can transform cottage cheese into a smooth cream will work. A food processor should do the trick too.
• Large bowl – For a change I don’t recommend a stand mixer for this bread. Why? I feel it overworks the dough far too easily and gives you a rather batter-like structure after just a few minutes of kneading. So, bowl and spoon it is.
• Spoon or dough whisk – In my trials I found a dough whisk worked best for combining the dry with the wet ingredients. A spoon felt like slightly more work to me. But use what you have.
• Banneton – A banneton is lovely if you bake on a regular basis. I particularly adore the silicone ones, as they can go into the dishwasher. The sets of them also often come with above mentioned dough whisk and some silicone baking mats, which are very useful for sticky sourdough bread.
• Dutch oven – Or any lidded cast iron pot. They heat up together with the oven, to provide the initial heat burst needed for that perfect oven spring. The lid keeps in steam for the first half of baking, meaning you get a shiny crust that is crunchy, but not too hard.

Tip:

If you’d like to know why I chose my particular equipment, how I make my cooking more efficient and what I use as a women with chronic pain to still enjoy baking as much as I do, check out my Page on How to Make Life in the Kitchen Easier!

Nutribullet

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Glass bowl

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banneton

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Dutch Oven

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How to Make this

Please Note: For optimal results and accurate ratios, this recipe provides measurements in grams. Bread baking, especially sourdough, relies on precise liquid-to-flour ratios, which can be inconsistent when measuring by volume (cups).

Bakers Schedule

2 days before you want to bake your bread:
Feed your sourdough starter.
(e.g., Early evening)

The afternoon before you want to bake your bread:
(e.g., Around 4:00 PM)

Mix the dough, let it rest for 30 minutes.

Perform 3 sets of stretch and folds roughly every 30 minutes (this doesn’t have to be exact).
(e.g., 4:30 PM, 5:00 PM, 5:30 PM)

Shape your dough and leave it to cold ferment covered in a banneton or bowl in the fridge overnight.
(e.g., 6:00 PM – until next morning)

The morning of baking:
Pre-heat your oven with the Dutch oven in it.
(e.g., Approx. 1 hour before baking)

Bake your bread to perfection.
(e.g., Approx. 50-60 minutes active baking)

Leave to cool for at least 2 hours before slicing.

The Steps

I’ll assume you have an existing sourdough starter. If not, you’ll need to start seven days earlier by creating one, following the steps in this recipe. It works just as well with white or rye flour.

2 days before you plan to bake your bread (or the morning before, if your kitchen is very warm)

Take 50g of your existing sourdough starter. Add 50g all-purpose flour (or bread flour) and 50g filtered water (or good quality drinking water). Leave it in a lightly covered container on your kitchen counter until the next day. If your kitchen is particularly warm, especially in summer, preparing it the morning before baking might be best.

1 day before baking

Blend the wet ingredients

In the afternoon start by blending the cottage cheese with some of the water and the protein powder until smooth.
Using a bread whisk, stir in the remaining water and 100g of the sourdough starter.
You could probably blend it, but I’m trying to be respectful of the little sourdough bacteria and treat them gently. Not everyone appreciates the wild ride in a blender!

Keep the remaining 50g of the starter for your next bread. You can keep it in the fridge, and it’ll last for at least a week.

Mix the dry ingredients

In a large bowl stir together the bread flour and salt. I’m using kosher salt, which has a higher volume per gram, so for me this is 2 tsp. If you are using sea salt, use 1 tsp.

Stir the wet into the dry ingredients using your dough whisk or spoon, make a little well in the middle of your flour then pour in your wet ingredient blend, stirring as you go. Mix until no dry flour patches remain.
The dough will be very sticky and lumpy at this point, that’s totally fine.

Leave it to rest for 30 minutes to 1h for the autolyse, allowing the flour to hydrate.

Tip:

If you only made yeasted bread before, this dough will seem way too wet and sticky and you’ll be tempted to throw a cup of flour into it, thinking the recipe is totally off and can’t work.
Resist the temptation and trust the process.

I sure did add the flour in my first few sourdough attempts and wondered why I kept ending up with “Dwarf Bread” as we called it: Hard as a rock, well suited to smacking intruders over the head, and you always find something better to eat.

Sourdough by nature is much wetter, softer and stickier than yeasted dough. But it will get easier to handle as soon as you start the stretch and folds.
Prepare for the magic.

Stretch and Folds: Building Structure (Optional but Recommended)

This part, while flexible and not absolutely crucial to making decent bread, helps developing the gluten rapidly during the bulk ferment, gives the dough structure and helps trapping air inside for those large bubbles you keep seeing in the pictures of sourdough bread. I also find it very satisfying.
I have left it out when making for example my German Rye Beer bread, which has a high rye flour content and won’t be as bubbly even if I kept stretching and folding all day long. But for this bread I usually do it, as I see the difference right away.

How To Do Stretch And Folds

Wet your hands. This will mostly prevent the sticky dough fingers. Contrary to flour, which makes them worse.

Push both hands under the dough and lift one side up. Stretch it until nearly the whole dough is lifted out of the bowl, then fold it over itself. Turn the bowl by 90 degrees and repeat. Do this 4 times, until the bowl has turned back full circle. Cover.

The pictures above are the results right after the first stretch and fold. You can see how fast this develops the gluten structure.

Repeat the process 2-3 more times after 30 minutes each, until you feel the dough is much smoother, easier to handle and shapes into a neat (if wobbly) loaf. After the last stretch and fold, either shape or cover and leave to ferment overnight in the fridge.

Shape Your Loaf

You can do this the evening before or on the day of baking. If you do shape on the day of baking your dough will need another hour of resting to puff up again.

On a floured surface, tip your dough out of the bowl.
Gently stretch it into a rough rectangle, then fold the corners into the middle. Rotate the dough and keep doing this, pinching the dough slightly in the middle, until you feel a good surface tension and it looks relatively round.

Add a little more flour, then turn around and push the dough underneath itself with either the side of your hand or a bench scraper, until you have a pretty smooth ball.

Flour your banneton or bowl well and flip your dough ball upside down inside. Cover with clingfilm or a shower cap and store in the fridge overnight for the cold ferment.
Or, if you decided to shape it in the morning before baking, allow to rise, covered, for another hour or two.

Bake Your Protein Sourdough Bread

Tip:

Measuring out Baking Parchment
(Optional but practical)

I started doing this after one of my earlier rye breads got stuck on the bottom of my Dutch oven and it was a mess to clean up. Using parchment or a silicone baking mat helps keep the pot clean and your bread come out easily. Even when it, for whatever reason, didn’t work perfectly well.

Turn your Dutch oven upside down on your worktop.

Get a piece of baking parchment that’s about 2cm/1in wider than your Dutch Ovens bottom.

Fold in half, then in half again, so you have a smaller square. Then keep folding into a triangle about 2-3 times.
Hold it on top of your pots bottom with the tip roughly in the middle of it. Fold it over the edge to measure about 2cm/1in down the side and cut the rest off with a pair of scissors.

Open out and admire your perfectly measured baking parchment, ready to hold your dough.

Pre-heat Oven

With the Dutch oven inside, pre-heat your oven to 475°F/245°C for 30 minutes to 1h.
Even if it shows as pre-heated after a shorter time, the longer time is needed to reach the optimal temperature.

Score Your Bread

While the oven heats up, carefully tip your dough onto the center of the prepared baking parchment. If necessary, gently push it back into shape. Sprinkle the top with a little flour, then, using a lame or a sharp knife, score your bread.

You can get as creative or simple as you like.
For the perfect scoring patterns you see online, you can freeze your bread for 10-20 minutes, which hardens the surface and makes precise scoring much easier. I admit I usually don’t bother.

One long score, about 1cm deep, at about a 45-degree angle slightly towards the side of the bread gives you the “classic” opening flap when the bread rises in the oven. Without scoring it would just break wherever it wants under the surface tension and might not rise as high. So one score is a good idea. Anything else is decoration.

Bake

Now it’s time to bake:

Using oven gloves, remove your pot from the oven onto a heat proof surface. Take off the lid.
Be mindful where you put this. I managed to burn a dark ring into a wooden chopping board. Ever since I put it either directly on my hob or a baking tray.

Using the edges of the baking parchment, carefully lower your loaf into the Dutch oven. Close the lid and put it back into the oven.
Immediately lower the temperature to 425°F/220°C and bake for 25 minutes.

After that time take off the lid and bake for 20-30 minutes longer or until deep golden brown with darker edges on the scored parts, where it puffed up.
Usually it is baked through at this point, but you can tap the bottom to check: If it sounds hollow your bread is ready. If not, bake for a few minutes longer.

Cool

Remove the bread from the oven. You can allow it to rest for about 20-30 minutes inside the Dutch oven. After that transfer to a cooling rack to avoid condensation and soggy crust.

Now comes the hard part. I know this smells really, really good and you want a slice right now!
But be patient. Leave to cool for at least 2 hours, to get a nice clean cut.

Enjoy your bread with some creamy cold butter.
Can I suggest some particularly flavorful Black Garlic Lemon butter to go with it?

Which Protein Powder Performed Best?

As promised, here’s a detailed breakdown of how each of the three protein powders performed in this recipe, helping you choose the best option for your baking.

Whey Protein Concentrate

I half expected this, as I have baked so much with it. The Whey concentrate resulted in a very “classic” sourdough loaf with a fairly open crumb and lovely crispy crust. It had the most oven spring of the 3 and worked perfect with the amount of liquid given in the recipe.
As it’s neutral in flavor, you would not know the bread has any protein powder in it.

You can serve this to anyone, and they won’t have a clue they are eating a bread that is rich in protein. All they’ll notice is that it’s really excellent sourdough bread and will ask you for the artisan bakers address you got it from.

Casein Protein

Unflavored as well, so it was neutral in flavor and virtually undetectable in the bread.
However, the Casein powder was absorbing noticeably more water, leading to a dough that was, while being much easier to work with, also dryer.
The crumb was finer, less open, even though the oven spring was good. It dried out much faster than the whey protein bread.

The taste was still lovely. So if you’d prefer Casein, I would add a little more water to the dough. Maybe 2-4 tbsp, then assess the dough.

Vegan Upcycled Barley-Rice Protein

This was caramel flavored, so maybe not a 100% fair comparison. But conclusions were still very possible and clear:
The barley-rice protein powder absorbed decidedly less water, leading to a much wetter dough and less oven spring. The crumb was finer and, due to barley being dark, also visibly darker, leading to it looking closer to a loaf of rye bread.

Now, the flavor was a fabulous surprise and led me to the conclusion that I want to experiment much more with barley protein in the future, if I can find an unflavored version. It was deeply malty (with the expected caramel sweetness), had a fabulous moist and silky mouthfeel and a crunchy crust.

I would add less water (about ¼ cup less at least) when using it again and probably play around with the sweet flavor a bit by adding maybe cinnamon and raisins to it.

With an unflavored version, the possibilities are endless and I think you could add more of this powder to a dough without negative impact on the structure than of the other two.

Conclusion

While Whey Concentrate delivered the most “classic” sourdough results with the existing recipe ratios, my personal excitement lies with the Upcycled Barley Protein. The potential to utilize a vegan, grain-based powder that not only reduces food waste but also enhances flavor and structure (much like diastatic malt) is incredibly promising. Imagine the possibilities for creating a wide range of protein breads that are both delicious and beneficial for our bodies and the environment!

How To Store

Homemade sourdough bread is incredibly meal prep friendly:

You can prepare it the day before and just push it into the oven in the morning or 3 hours before you’d like to eat it. Or prepare the dough up to 3 days in advance and leave it in the fridge. The sourdough flavor will get more pronounced the longer it ferments.

All of these breads keep well in a bread tin for about 3 days or up to 5 in the fridge.
They freeze perfectly for up to 6 months and are excellent toasted.

FAQ

Now I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Have you tried this? Did you enjoy it?
What other recipes would you like to see?

And if you enjoyed this recipe, please consider rating, sharing, or leaving a comment – your feedback truly helps my blog grow!

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