no. 117: one kind of bread

If you’ve been reading a while, you’ve probably seen a picture like this.

I know how to make exactly one kind of bread, and depending on how you count, I started making it sometime after 2004. The recipe’s changed, but it’s the same bread. Both of these things are true.

This is the recipe as it stands today. Maybe I should paywall this. Recipes, I’m told, convert. But maybe this isn’t a recipe at all.

My bread is 80-85% hydration and mostly whole grain. These days it’s 80% whole wheat and 20% AP. 1.5% salt. In some sense that’s the whole recipe.

I use a solid starter, 40g King Arthur AP and 28g water. It lives in a jar that used to hold smoked sprats, the dour northern cousins of sardines. Like D, they come from Riga. I renew it almost entirely each time I use it, keeping maybe a teaspoon in the jar.

There’s a summer process and a winter one.

In summer I just make the bread. My kitchen stays in the high 70s-mid 80s F (25-30C). The water in NoVA tastes terrible, so my filter sits next to the sink, meaning my water’s always room temp too.

I disperse the starter in the water, add the salt and flour, and stir it all together with a spoon. I merely bring the dough together, so it looks like this.

The recipe’s deliberately short on water, for ease of control, but I want no dry patches in the dough. I always add more to collect the last of the flour at this stage, and switch to a dough scraper to clean the bowl.

Then I cover it and let it hang out. I fold the dough twice over the course of a 4-8 hour bulk ferment, once at the halfway mark, and again ¾ of the way in. Each time I do 4 coil-folds. I use water on my hands and scraper, not flour. After the first fold, it looks like this.

I shape a boule, and proof seam-down in a large basket. The proof happens as it happens. Sometimes it’s an hour at room temp, sometimes I refrigerate it overnight, whatever’s most convenient.

I bake at 475F (247C) in an old Lodge dutch oven, 20 min covered and 20 uncovered, or a little longer if the dough is cold from the fridge.

I dust the base with semolina or cornmeal, and spritz the loaf heavily before putting the lid on, so much so that water runs down the top.

In winter the process tends to be more predictable, because I use a sponge: 100g whole wheat and 80g water. My starter, like me, hates being below about 74-75F, but above that, it’s si, se puede! (or as we’d say in Singapore, “boleh!”) The sponge takes 7-8 hours to develop, and in practice there’s never a reason to let it sit much longer.

I mix the sponge straight into the dough, just as I do with the starter. Bulk fermentation runs 2.5-3 hours, with 2 folds. I space the folds evenly, so usually I’m folding at 50-60 minute intervals. I proof and bake the same way, though the reality of the workday means I rarely retard in winter.

I know all this sounds confident and definitive, but that’s only because I’ve written it down, and elided the time I spend looking at the dough, touching the flour, and thinking about whether it needs another fold.

We created our starter in 2004, while dogsitting in Weston, MA. We used to say the bread tasted like Weston, until we found out that how you tend your starter matters much more than the culture it started with. Nurture over nature. I guess now it tastes like us.

I think I actually learned to bake in the summer of 2005, when I spend a month baking on a sort of post-industrial cheese farm in New Jersey. It was called the Bobolink Dairy & Bakehouse, and Jonathan and Nina are still running it. They’re generous, complete, ingenious people, and I recommend visiting them if you possibly can – but they didn’t actually teach me to bake. That job fell to their baker, a genial wisp named Brendan. I remember he was from one of the St. Louis because he was the first person I’d met from either.

The bakehouse was a shipping container with a small air conditioner rammed into its side. When we got a shipment of flour, we’d open the cargo doors on one end and load the 50 pound sacks in by hand – being, after all, a couple of strong-backed millennials. The container abutted a shed made of honeycomb board and wriggly tin, and the shed housed a brick oven with the footprint of a king size bed. We’d fire the oven with 350 pounds of wood each night, then scrape the ashes out in the morning and bake using residual heat – sourdoughs, and ciabattas and rye. In summer the rye was more a batter than a dough. We followed the classic formula for dough temperature, but the setup demanded harmony rather than control. The bakeyard was whatever temperature it was, the bakehouse more or less was too, and the oven didn’t have a dial on it either. I still like my bread to look rustic.

I’d return to Bobolink again and again, and was lucky enough to spend a few weekends baking with B, who’d wound up at Bobolink for a spell while taking a break from Balthazar. I don’t remember much about how we baked at home, other than that we used a baking stone, not a dutch oven. We stuck to Hamelman’s sourdoughs, and explored his book. It didn’t feel as fluid as it does today, though I can’t remember why. I think it’s that the fluency kicks in largely during the repetitive phases, when you’re dealing with a hundred of the same loaf at once. Brendan and B were far better judges of dough than I am, but they still paused to do it.

Diana made the bread for our first restaurant. Three levains and three loaves of rye a day, emerging from the oven just before staff meal. It was still warm for service – too warm, so we couldn’t slice it fine, and had to saw it into thick, steaming tranches with crumbs sticking to the knife. We served it with a tall wave of butter on a flat stone, with a glittering crest of Maldon salt.

When we added the cafe, I took on the bread instead, but I spent those years trying to fix the Titanic with a tyre kit, and did the bread on autopilot, neglecting it the way you neglect a solid employee. We switched from a liquid starter to a solid one then, and one of my few forms of solace was watching the starter breathe. It was around this time that I started proofing seam-side down – it was one less thing to do.

I switched to mixing by hand sometime after we closed the restaurants in 2017. I think it was after our first trip to see Ed in Vermont, and watching him make bread. He’s a one-loaf cook as well, I think. Or at least, there’s the daily bread, and then there’s everything else. Ed’s mildly allergic to modern devices, and there was something about the act of bringing the dough together with a wooden spoon, a reminder that we’ve done this since long before we had machines, and that, after fossil fuels are gone, we may do this again.

The only commercial bakers who mix by hand seem to work at wooden troughs, contemporary objects made to echo much older ones, in European bakeries that double as churches of biodynamics. I remember B telling me at one point, “the problem with baking is that everything takes up so much space, and at each stage, you require even more.” Mixing in a trough means leaving the dough in there for part of the bulk fermentation, which makes me wonder how much bread they can make in a day. Do they mix only once every few hours? Are these saved for particular breads? There are few absurdities I fail to fall for.

The idea of skipping the pre-ferment came after we moved to a claustrophobic, cellular concrete tower in Harlem. The building was a dense, heaving neighborhood, intensely alive. We were in a fervid apartment on the 18th floor, and the heat felt metabolic.

Using any amount of pre-ferment made the process a sprint, and gave me grain-forward loaves without enough of the flavor of fermentation. Instead I let a homeopathic amount of starter loose upon the great expanse of the final dough, then tried to bring them to the right place at the right time. Time and fermentation both help gluten form. You have an ideal stage of gluten formation, and an ideal stage of fermentation, and you’re trying to shepherd the two processes so they both arrive there at the same time, with nothing more than temperature and the handling of the dough. Like eating doughnuts using just your pinkies.

I was at home all day because I was writing my first book, the one that won’t see light of day (I’ve learned from Neal Stephenson, who, having sold his first book, now has to go around removing every copy from this earth). I futzed around with autolyzes, and a few memorable weeks of laminating the dough instead of folding it. That yielded nothing but bragging rights and more cleanup – the idea came from social media.

Those loaves were still mostly white. 90% AP, 10% rye, about 70% hydration. There were several equilibria en route to this one: 50% whole, 40% AP, 10% rye, then 75/15/10, and probably some others in between.

I think I started adding more whole grain when we slipped back into Cambridge in that first pandemic winter, a dangerously comfortable homecoming. I could bike to an actual mill. I bought whatever flour they sold me, and it was never the same. Some seemed to release water during the fermentation, others were too relaxed, giving loaves with good structure but no ambition. These were the pandemic years, so I was working at home, checking the bread between zoom calls. I kept no notes. If I had a destination in mind, I didn’t know how to get there. The bread remained edible.

Cambridge was colder, which led me to the winter routine. The most noticeable difference to me isn’t the volume or the flavor, but the sheer consistency the preferment brings. Normal, sane bakers know this already. The fresh milled flours also led me to overwork the dough a little, folding it 3 or 4 times for security. Nothing catastrophic happened, but I realized I was trading a bit of extensibility for strength, which is why I only fold twice now.

My flour changed again when we moved to Virginia – this mill doesn’t tell me where each batch is from, so I’m unsure if the variation comes from the milling or the grain. I’ve gotten batches full of bran, and batches that were almost rice-flour fine. There’s one farm in the market that sells flour. When you buy it, they inform you that it’s not for bread. They bake too, but their bread is more earnest than delicious. That flour yielded dough as flaccid as a napping retriever. I made focaccia.

What hasn’t changed? The starter’s the one we started in 2004, but it feels strange to assign a living thing a fixed identity. The basket. The King Arthur AP. And yet it feels like the same loaf.

This year I tried to teach myself to bake something else, and started winging things, knocking doughs together with no recipe and no vision in mind. Sometimes I’d go two weeks between loaves of sourdough. At one point we were staying with a dozen friends, and I made four different breads over four days, with neither recipes nor expectations. Focaccia, milk bread, cream bread, and something between a Parker House and a pain de mie. Every loaf had something irreducible in common, an even muscularity to the crumb.

I was talking to a friend about what it means to really know a thing. The definition we came to was that you could pull it off while roaring drunk or before you’d had your morning coffee. I know how to make bread, but maybe I only know how to make one.

And if you’ve read this far, please take a split second to stab that little heart at the bottom of this post, it actually helps. The magic of our algorithmic overlords is puissant! All hail!