Had a fun experience today — one of my friends finally took the bait and asked me for the full download on how to make my default crusty bread. I said “hang out at my place for a full day and I’ll get you to the next level,” and he actually did it. First graduate of nick’s bread school!

(Most people want nothing to do with that whole process; you’re looking for someone who gets excited by how many parameters they’re gonna have to hand-tweak to get shit dialed in.)

Anyway, the reason I said hang around for a full day is that there’s a bunch of technique elements that are just plain unexplainable. You have to see it, and then you have to immediately do it with your own hands (and ideally instant feedback on how close you got to the right moves). YouTube can be a godsend for this but there’s nothing as good as the real deal, even if your teacher is mid at explaining physical movements. I had him do his own batch and reproduce my actions right after I did em, which also meant he got to go home with his own loaf.

With the caveat that this is only fractionally useful without some supplementary visual (and ideally tactile and olfactory) aids, I went to the trouble of writing up some notes to print out for him, so I figured I’d dump em here as well.

Bread school course notes

Useful texts

Ken Forkish, Flour Water Salt Yeast (good first bread book, explains fundamentals usefully.)
Chad something-or-other, Tartine Bread (excellent next-level techniques, source of most of what I'm currently doing.)
forums at https://www.thefreshloaf.com/ (relatively high-quality discourse from enthusiasts; it's unvetted and uncollected, but many of whom actually know things.)
I've got a custom white sandwich bread formula that Ruth and Michael like; I can send you that later if you want it. It's similar techniques as the crusty bread, but more ingredients, so the initial mix is more annoying.

Flour theory

Most home baking, you want unbleached "all-purpose" flour with a middling gluten content, probably around 11% protein. That's less than in "bread flour."

This gives generally good results when you're not using a hardcore commercial mechanical mixer. Bread flour ain't bad either, but I prefer this.

Avoid "pastry flour," it's unsuitable for bread bc the protein is way too low. Same with any kind of "bleached flour."

Dough theory

This dough is WET. Once you factor in the moisture from the levain, it's like 78% hydration.

The trick with handling wet dough is:

Light touch — limit how much surface area of your hands touches the dough. If necessary, wet your hands to make them less sticky.
Fast and decisive touch — get in and get out, don't mess around. If that means the dough hits the bowl a little hard, fine — that's better than it touching your hands for too long.

You might be tempted to use a ton of dusting flour to make a barrier, but try to hold back as best you can. (You'll need SOME, but you really don't want to get any folded into the loaf.)

Also, avoid tearing the dough as best you can. You need to stretch the surface of it to make tension (tension is necessary for getting a good shapely rise), but don't take it too far and rip it.

If the dough DOES really want to rip, sometimes that's a sign of something off with your starter! If the population of unwanted organisms is too high, you can get extremely strange chemical byproducts that can shred the gluten structures you need. There's a fair amount of controversy around what these chemicals are; conventional wisdom says it's protease enzymes, but a couple chemists on the Fresh Loaf forums say it's more likely to be what they call "pesky thiol compounds." Point is, it's an exotic failure mode but the fix is to try and get your starter happy, which consists of fairly normal-sounding steps.

Bread formula

40% whole wheat flour
60% all-purpose flour
75% water
23% levain (less if it's real hot out)
2% salt

We're making a batch with a kilo of flour, which makes the math easy.

A single big-ass loaf gives tastier results than several little loaves. This is some kind of square/cube law interaction but I can't explain it any further than that, it's just how things are.

Alternate flour balances

25% whole wheat, 75% all-purpose
- yields a somewhat more delicate flavor, and slightly bigger holes in the crumb.
20% whole wheat, 20% dark rye, 60% all-purpose
- the resulting style is called a "miche." It's denser, but still surprisingly fluffy, and adds a restrained but exciting rye sharpness. This is low-key my favorite, and you might want to make it your regular; it's just that the rye makes the already-wet dough even harder to handle, so do at least two standard batches on your own before attempting this.

Instructions

The night before, make your levain:
- 23g ripe starter
- 115g stale water (heat to 80° if it's below 70° ambient)
- 115g 50/50 whole wheat/all-purpose flour blend
- These ratios depend on the ambient temp and the time in the evening you're mixing it. Sorry! You'll need to keep logs as the year goes on, and note how ready/unready/over-ready the levain is in the morning.
- Just make sure you're mixing like at least 250g for a bake where you're using 230g, so you have some left as starter.

The next morning, start mixing the dough.

Use stale water that's been sitting in a jar on the counter for some hours.
Heat water on stove
- How much? Depends on ambient temp. Between 65° and 75° ambient, I usually heat water to like 95°.
Combine water and levain, mix until liquid.
Add flours, mix until it's a shaggy ball using dough whisk (or improvised tool).

(that's "rough mix")

Measure out salt and 50g of reserve water, set them aside.
Cover bowl, rest 25m.
Feed your starter for the day, using what's left of your levain.

Once that 25m is up:

Add salt and a little bit of water to the dough (how much water? Depends, but not the whole 50g reserve.)
Mix with crab pincer motion with your hands until it's a homogeneous texture and you can't feel salt crystals.
Scrape bowl and hands with bowl scraper.

(that's "final mix")

Write down various temps and amounts, and note the time of final mix.
Put bowl by a source of ambient heat; if it's under 70° inside, run the oven for a couple minutes then turn it off, and use the warm chamber.
every 30m, stretch and fold the dough in its bowl until it wants to form a ball.
- Do this during the first 2 hours of bulk fermentation.
Let bulk fermentation run for 4-5 hours after the final mix. Actual time varies depending on temperatures and amount of levain.

(that's "bulk ferment finished")

Clean the counter.
Dump dough onto counter.
Pre-shape it with a bench knife -- moisten if necessary. Drag the dough with the bench knife held almost vertical.
Dust with 50/50 rice/all-purpose flour and cover with cloth.
Rest 25m.
Final shape -- flip it, stretch and fold it like a letter, then shimmy with the bench knife.
Put loaf upside down in cloth-lined bowl; fold the cloth over it.

(that's "shaping finished")

Wait 1:30, then preheat the oven for a half hour, for a total 2 hours of "proofing."
Preheat oven to 475°.

(that's "proofing finished")

Turn oven down to 425°
Heat your baking vessel in the preheated oven; if it's a dutch oven, you'll need to add it probably at the start of preheat.
Get the loaf into/onto the baking vessel and score the top. Technique varies depending on what you're using! I'm gonna flip it onto a floured (rice flour blend) breadboard, slice it, and slide it in; with a dutch oven you'll need to improvise something yourself.
Bake for 20m covered
Remove cover, rotate loaf, and bake for 18m uncovered.
- Ultimately you're looking to get the internal temperature of the bread above 200°, probably above 205°; I don't measure it anymore, but that's the point where the starches gelatinize and make a flour-only bread actually work right. If you're trying to get your own oven dialed in, you might want to check with the probe thermometer for your own information!
Put the bread on a wire rack to cool.
- Try to let it get cool (or mostly-cool) before cutting into it. It's actually still processing at this stage — the heat is diffusing the remaining moisture in the core outward into the crust, and you don't want to crack the shell and let that moisture escape prematurely; the bread will stale faster if you do.
Done!

Tools and stuff

Kitchen notebook! One you don't mind getting jam on.
Big bowl
Loaf form (a bowl or pans or something)
A woven undyed cloth
Dough whisk
Silicone or plastic bowl scraper
Bench knife
A baking surface and steam chamber of some kind; either stones + pan, sheet + pan, or a dutch oven.
Razor blade on a stick ("lamé")
Large breadboard for transferring dough, maybe
Something to manipulate hot bread with
Probe thermometer
Starter tub
Some counter space
Dusting flour (50/50 rice flour / all-purpose)

Handling the starter

Theory

It's an ecosystem, not an organism; there's way too much stuff going on in there to properly comprehend, so you need to just pick some mental models that happen to give good results.
When it gets out of whack, malfunctions aren't linear; maybe the taste is right but it doesn't rise right, or something like that.
"Start as you mean to go on." The ecosystem adapts to whatever environment it has to deal with on the regular, so you don't want the environment you use for baking to be unusual or surprising!
- In particular: don't chill it, don't starve it. It will need time to recover from those.
It's a self-defending ecosystem — the lactobaccilus makes acid that other organisms don't like, and the yeast makes alcohol that other organisms don't like, so once the starter is on-line and producing well, it's pretty hard for unwanted stuff to move in.
The starter originates from ambient wild inputs — spores on flour, spores in the air. It's constantly getting "new blood" from those inputs, so a starter from somewhere else will shift and change over time.
I'm trying to time my levain so that it's "young" and kind of sweet-smelling at the time of mixing dough. You'll need to track amounts and temperatures and timings in a table in your notebook to get this dialed in.
"The float test": If a blob of starter/levain floats when dropped into water, it's ripe. This is because of the CO2 bubbles that the fermentation makes throughout the batter.
- I usually make a snug-enough amount that I don't have a ton to spare for float testing. If you wanna do that to check how on-track you are, just make a bit of extra levain.

Practice

Feed it every day, but you don't need to maintain very much of it at a time.
- I usually do 8g starter / 13g stale water / 13g 50/50 flour blend.
It's more finicky than commercial yeast:
- It doesn't like being cold. If your house is under like 70°, put the starter next to something that makes waste heat, like the top of the fridge or something.
- It doesn't like chlorine, which we DO have in our tap water. So leave water in a jar on the counter for a few hours before giving it to your starter or dough.

Recovery

To put your starter on pause for weeks or months, desiccate it. Spread a thin layer on parchment paper so it dries into a cracker, then break the cracker up and put it in a mason jar. To bring it back, rehydrate and start feeding it.
If starter is misbehaving, you can help it out:
- Add a bit of lemon juice to your stale water; not much, maybe like 1/8 tsp per liter.
  - This will make your water turn kinda manky on the counter after several days, so replace it more often. But also don't sweat it too much, because whatever's growing in there is pretty similar to the stuff you're trying to farm on purpose in your starter. :)
- Keep the starter warmer, shoot for 75° if you can?
- Feed it a bit more often but reduce the amount; maybe do twice a day at 1:1:1 ratio for a few days.

Roadrunner Twice

Gonna send u back to BREAD • SCHOOL