In a well-ordered world, good bread is no further away than the nearest baker. Only in recent years have we in Triangle had good bread available at all. After a few practice loaves things will get simpler, and you be rewarded with great bread. Leavened bread is a simple food that has been around since at least Egyptian times, and its basics are simple. That's what makes the achievement of great bread such a fascinating exercise.
Salt is crucial for both taste and texture.
Good quality sea salt is a nice luxury. High quality flour makes a surprising difference. I say beasts because the defining characteristic of a sourdough bread is that its leavening is a symbiotic culture of lactobacilli and wild yeast. Bread made from a flour, water and commercial yeast slurry, let to mature for two hours to a day, is not sourdough. That technique and its variants is called in France 'poolish', in Italy 'biga', and, in American, 'the sponge method'.