Sourdough.

Sourdough is a great way to make bread at home. Its special qualities are a flavour profile unique to the culture used, slowness of rising, which allows you to prepare it during the course of a day or even overnight, and its longer keeping time compared with yeast bread.
I have been making sourdough for a few years now, from one culture. My reference is a great book by Emily Buehler called Bread Science, which you can get online here.
The distinguishing feature of sourdough is that it is leavened by a long-lived starter culture, which is a stable community of microbes. In this way it is quite different to standard bread which is risen with a pure strain of yeast. The other ingredients are identical. I make bread with white bakers flour, a second flour like rye or wholemeal, water and salt. Of course there are many other ingredients that can be added, like milk, fat and eggs. I will discuss these in a later post.
Commercial sourdoughs are often spiked with bakers yeast to move things along, which is fine. To complicate things, you can also make yeast breads with pre-ferments, which are batters of flour, water and yeast, left to ferment, typically overnight, to improve the flavour of the final loaf.
The starter gives sourdough its characteristic taste, which for me suits a different suite of flavours to yeast bread.
If you’re starting out serious bread making I would recommend getting a good technique going with yeast bread. But if you do go the sourdough way, you will be rewarded with bread that’s probably better than you can buy, at a fraction of the price, when you want it, and in your favourite styles.