Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza

^* The baker’s percentage for poolish is the amount of flour in the poolish expressed as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe.

4. Divide With floured hands, gently ease the dough out of the tub and onto a lightly floured work surface. With your hands still floured, pick up the dough and ease it back down onto the work surface in a somewhat even shape. Use a bit of flour to dust the area in the middle where you’ll cut the dough, then cut it into 2 equal-size pieces with a dough knife or plastic dough scraper.

Invert the proofed loaf onto a lightly floured countertop (moderately floured if making the fendue shape). The seam side, now facing up, will be the top of the baked loaf. To make the fendue shape (which is optional), sprinkle a moderate amount of flour across the middle of the loaf and use a 1-inch-diameter dowel to press down through the loaf all the way to the work surface. Roll the dowel back and forth just a bit to create about 1 inch of space flattened down the middle of the loaf.

^* The baker’s percentage for poolish is the amount of flour in the poolish expressed as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe.

If you want to coat the crust of the bread with bran, use about 10 grams of bran per loaf (more than that won’t adhere) and sprinkle it evenly in the empty proofing baskets after dusting them with flour. Before placing the loaves in the proofing baskets, roll them seam side up and lightly spritz the top (seam side) with water to help the bran adhere. If you don’t have a spray bottle for spritzing, you can use your hand to spread a very thin film of water over the seam side of the loaves. Put the loaves in the baskets, seam side down as usual. The bran will adhere to the loaf while it’s proofing.

Remove the preheated Dutch oven from your kitchen oven. Remove the lid, carefully place the loaf in the Dutch oven seam side up. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake for 20 minutes, or until at least medium dark brown all around the loaf. (If you coated the loaves with bran, it’s okay for the bran to take on a deep color, and you want to bake the loaves as long as possible to get the crispest crust.) Check after 15 minutes of baking uncovered in case your oven runs hot.

^* The baker’s percentage for biga is the amount of flour in the biga expressed as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe.

Mix by hand, wetting your working hand before mixing so the dough doesn’t stick to you. (It’s fine to rewet your hand three or four times while you mix.) Use the pincer method alternating with folding the dough to fully integrate the ingredients. Most of the dough is the biga and the biga is at room temperature, so the final mix temperature depends on the ambient temperature. For an overnight temperature of about 67°F (19°C), the final mix temperature probably won’t be much higher than 74°F (23°C). For this bread, that will be fine, although a final mix temperature of 78°F to 80°F (26°C to 27°C) would be ideal. For a final mix temperature of 74°F (23°C), bulk dough fermentation will take about 3½ hours; for a final mix temperature of 78°F to 80°F (26°C to 27°C), it will probably take 2½ to 3 hours.

^* The baker’s percentage for biga is the amount of flour in the biga expressed as a percentage of the total flour in the recipe.

The Early Morning Bread Baker’s Routine

For the first several years after opening the bakery, this was me three or four days a week. On the other days I worked the afternoon bread baker’s shift, which meant I was responsible for mixing the levain doughs, baking the afternoon batch of baguettes and brioches, dividing and shaping the levain breads for morning baking, mixing the pre-ferments (poolish and biga) for the next morning’s baguette and ciabatta mixes, mixing the late afternoon levain, and then sweeping and locking up. On top of working either the morning or afternoon shift, I also did bread deliveries on Sundays and Mondays and was always on call if anything came up. Some days I baked pastries or rolled croissants, and I worked the counter when the line backed up. Meanwhile I had to find time to take care of office tasks: production scheduling, wholesale account management, bookkeeping, and personnel management. Once a month I drove across town to Hair of the Dog brewery to pick up a bucket of spent grains (and to have a quick glass of Fred) from owner and brewer Alan Sprints, to use in the bakery’s rye bread. Dough is always moving. Finding the twenty or thirty minutes needed to run any errand was a mad dash. Where is the pause button?!

As the bakery grew I could afford to hire more bakers. Gradually I was able to remove myself from many of the day-to-day production tasks, thanks to a staff that can handle the workload and maintain the bakery’s high standards for quality. Most of my staff work eight hours straight, without breaks except for the occasional smoke or quick bite to eat.

Here’s the schedule of the last early morning bread baking shift I worked. As you’ll see from reading through it, the activities are nonstop, and the shifts continue that way to this day.

3:30 A.M.: Arrive at the bakery. Turn the oven up to 500°F. Check the tubs of poolish and biga for the morning mixes to see if they’re at their ideal point of maturation and ready to be used in the dough mixes.

Remove sheet pans of croissants and other viennoiserie products for the morning’s bake from the refrigerator and the retarder. Set up a rack with the croissants for proofing so they’ll be ready for the pastry team to begin baking around 6 a.m. If it’s chilly in the bakery, put the rack in front of the oven.

Remove 50-pound bags of flour from the retarder, where they were chilled overnight to allow for a proper finished dough temperature in the heat of the bakery (friction from the dough mixer adds heat to the dough too).

4 A.M.: Autolyse the baguette dough. Scale the flour, usually 60 to 80 kilos (depending on what is specified on today’s mix sheets) and dump it in the mixer. Carry big buckets of cold water between my legs (it’s not graceful) from the refrigerator to the mixer. If it’s hot, add some ice to keep the dough mix from warming up too much—break up the ice with a knife steel. Scale the ice and water to the amount on the day’s mix sheet and dump it into the mixer. We use dough tubs that hold a little more than 20 kilos of water—the groggy baker will learn to use the same increments each day, so if, for example, 42.4 kilos of water are needed for this baguette mix, then I use an empty tub on the scale filled to 20 kilos twice, then add the final 2.4 kilos. Turn the mixer on to low speed and mix for about 1 minute. Then run the mixer in reverse for 5 or 10 seconds to pick up any dry flour from the bottom of the bowl.

Turn off the mixer. Set a timer for 20 minutes. Go into the office and put on some music. Make a coffee.

4:15 A.M.: Scale out yeast and salt for the baguette mix and the ciabatta mix. Dump the poolish, mixed the previous afternoon, into the bread mixer. Depending on the day and the size of the mix, that’s between three and six tubs of poolish, which should be at its optimum point at this time in the morning: with hundreds of small bubbles that give the top surface the appearance of tapioca. If you stare at it, you can see occasional little eruptions as bubbles pop on the surface. The classic French method for removing the poolish is to reserve some of the water for the mix to pour around the edges and loosen the poolish from its container, but I find it slides into the mixing bowl easily enough, especially with a little encouragement from a hand and a plastic dough scraper. Add the fresh yeast and salt.

4:25 A.M.: Begin the baguette mix, on first speed. Set timer for 5 minutes. Take empty poolish tubs to the dish pit and rinse them out. Grab a bunch of empty dough tubs and a bar towel, take them to the baker’s bench, and oil the seven or more dough tubs needed for the finished baguette dough.

4:30 A.M.: Timer goes off. Change the mixer to second speed and set timer for 4 minutes.

4:35 A.M.: Baguette mix done. Check dough temperature with a probe thermometer—it should be about 75°F. Transfer to the oiled dough tubs, 14 kilos of dough per tub. Put tubs of dough in the retarder for the afternoon baguette bake, in accordance with the day’s mix sheet. Record the mix temperature and the time the mix was completed on the mix sheet. Plan on cutting the dough set aside for the morning bake around 6:15 a.m.

4:45 A.M.: Feed the levain, which was last mixed the previous afternoon and is now bubbly, acidic, leathery smelling, and generally nasty. First, throw all but a small amount from the levain into the trash. We handle the levain at this stage wearing food safety gloves because the acidity of the levain can wear out the skin in sensitive spots (I used to get small lesions and splits on my fingertips). The remaining fistful of levain hardly looks like it could initiate the leavening of several hundred loaves of bread, but it does—yeast puts rabbits to shame. Add a few kilos of flour and very warm water to the tub and mix the levain by hand.

4:55 A.M.: Autolyse the ciabatta dough. Once again waddle with tubs of cold water from the fridge to the mixer and carry chilled 50-pound bags of flour from the retarder. Pretend to listen to Rollie, the dairy guy who always shows up about now and starts telling me stories when I’m tired and want to stay focused on my work. Think, Rollie’s a great guy. I wish he’d shut up. Scale out amounts of flour and water in accordance with formula sheets prepared the day before. Mix on first speed until the water and flour are incorporated.

5:00 A.M.: Begin baking levain breads (Country Blonde, Country Brown, the big boules, and walnut bread), which were shaped the previous afternoon and spent the night slowly proofing in the retarder. For the next 20 minutes, load 144 regular-size levain loaves into the oven.

5:25 A.M.: Begin the ciabatta mix. To the flour and water that was mixed in the autolyse, add several tubs of biga—pre-fermented dough that gives the ciabatta its great flavor—plus the dry yeast and salt, and start the mix on first speed. Set a timer.

(We use fresh baker’s yeast for the baguette dough and SAF Red Instant yeast for our ciabatta dough, in part because it keeps the morning baker from getting confused about which pair of yeast and salt bowls, scaled out earlier, goes into each mix. Never underestimate the ability of a foggy early morning brain to make a mistake. There isn’t a lot of time for reflection.)

Check the breads in the oven. Turn the oven temperature down to 480°F.

Remove the raisin-pecan dough from the retarder and divide it into about two dozen pieces, each scaled to 475 grams. Shape them into little torpedoes. Place the pieces on proof boards and put them in a covered rack.

Check the ciabatta dough, switch the mixer to second speed, and reset the timer. Generously oil seven or eight tubs for the ciabatta dough, which is wet and sticky and requires a few folds during fermentation to build up strength. Not enough oil in the tubs before they receive the dough dooms the baker to a challenge of dough sticking to the tubs when there’s just not much time to deal with it.

Remove the baked bread from the first and second decks of the oven.

5:45 A.M.: Shape the raisin-pecan dough into loaves.

6:00 A.M.: Check the remaining bread in the oven. Finish the ciabatta mix and check the dough temperature.

If the loaves in the third and fourth decks of the oven aren’t quite ready, remove the ciabatta dough from the big mixer bowl and cut and weigh it into the oiled tubs. Although this 10-minute task is best done from start to finish without stopping, the timing doesn’t always allow that. If there is a 5-minute window before I need to go back to the oven, I’ll take it. To remove this dough from the mixer, I wet my left arm completely (the sink’s right there), reach inside the mixing bowl to lift a big hunk of dough, and with the other hand wielding the bread knife, cut the dough cleanly where it is still attached to the rest—all the while being careful not to let the dough tear. Put about 7 kilos of dough in each tub (more than that will overflow the bin because it expands over three times when it rises). Stack the tubs on a rolling cart next to the baker’s bench. I would usually end up running back and forth: from the mixer, removing the dough, interrupted by the sound of the timer; to the oven to check the bread, and if ready, pull it out.

Having left enough ciabatta dough in the mixer for our multigrain bread, add the grain mixture and incorporate. Remove this dough to a separate oiled dough tub. Scrape out the mixing bowl completely, leaving no bits of dough behind.

Reload the entire oven. Since the baguette dough needs me to hit it when it’s ready 6:15 a.m., not when I’m ready for it, sometimes the second load of the oven just needs to be done fast and that’s when the overdrive gear kicks in. When it’s time to move fast, well, fast it is.

6:15 A.M.: Begin dividing the baguettes. We do this by hand. Flour the baker’s bench, invert a tub of dough over it, and use a scraper to gently ease the dough out of the tub and onto the bench. Next to the dough is a scale. Tamp off any excess oil from the dough using a bar towel, toss some flour on top of the dough, cut with a bench knife, and manually scale each piece of dough. Many bakeries use a piece of equipment called a divider to automate this process, often with excellent results, but I have always preferred to divide and shape our doughs the old fashioned way, by hand.

6:45 A.M.: Put a fold in each tub of ciabatta dough. Put a fold in the tub of levain.

Check the oven and remove the finished levain breads. The levain bake should be finished at this point: big 3-kilo boules of Country Blonde, 2-kilo boules of Country Brown (reminiscent of pain Poilâne), bâtard loaves of Country Brown and Country Blonde, demi baguettes of Country Blonde for one of our restaurants, walnut bread, and small loaves of walnut, Country Blonde, and Country Brown.

6:55 A.M.: Start shaping the baguettes. A good baker can divide, rest, and shape at least one hundred baguettes in an hour. While this requires a steady and fast pair of hands and continuous effort without pause, it also gives me my first chance to relax a bit. All of the morning mixes are done, the doughs are rising in their tubs, the levain bread is baked and out of the oven, and hopefully everything is right on schedule. It feels good to be able to shape baguettes and do nothing else for a while, without having to stop to engage in another coincident activity. Of course, there are over one hundred baguettes to shape.

7:45 A.M.: Feed the levain again. Check the production schedule to see how much levain needs to be mixed today. Measure out the amount needed from the first levain mix, throw the rest away, and mix this feeding of the levain in the bread mixer.

Put a second fold in each tub of ciabatta dough.

7:55 A.M.: Begin baking the baguettes, preferably a little earlier. We need baguettes for our early-morning customers and for a jambon sandwich we make that is very popular (buttered ficelle with a small amount of sliced ham and a slice of good cheese—especially satisfying because the flavors of all the ingredients are in balance and the bread has a sparkling kind of flavor if eaten early enough, while it’s still very fresh). My biggest stress point is having the baguettes come out of the oven in time to cool before we have to bag them and get out the door with the first round of morning deliveries. We can’t bag hot bread because it ruins it, causing the crust to go limp from the bread’s own steam.

8:45 A.M.: Finish baking the baguettes. Clean up around the oven and rack the couches to dry. (Couches are pieces of linen fabric that we use to support the shaped loaves—baguettes, boules, and bâtards—while they rise. They absorb some of the dampness of the bread dough, and it’s best to dry them out before using them again.)

9:00 A.M.: Cut the ciabatta (my favorite dough to handle and bake) into loaves and buns. Now that the 7 kilos of ciabatta dough in each tub has tripled in size, the dough is sticking to the lids. Invert a tub onto the heavily floured baker’s bench and, because I oiled the tubs so generously back at about 5:40 a.m., the dough pops right out. The dough holds the shape of the tub, thanks to the folds I gave it during its rise. Cut the dough, which has the texture of bubbly, gassy Jell-O, into 6-inch-wide loaves 14 to 16 inches long for retail and about 2½ feet long for restaurants. Put the shaped loaves on moderately floured couches to proof.

9:30 A.M.: Sweep up around the bread bench. Mix the brioche dough.

10:15 A.M.: Begin baking the ciabatta, loading them into a very hot oven, at nearly 500°F. The unscored loaves naturally crack open along fissures, giving them a nice organic appearance.

11:15 A.M.: Out of the oven and on the cooling rack, the baked ciabatta loaves crackle in a loud staccato, sounding like drummer boys in the woodwork.

Clean up around the oven and say hello to the rest of the day.

Poolish
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
White flour	500 g	3¾ cups + 2 tbsp
Water	500 g, 80ºF (27ºC)	2¼ cups
Instant dried yeast	0.4 g	Scant ⅛ tsp

Final Dough			Baker’s Formula
INGREDIENT	FINAL DOUGH MIX QUANTITY		QUANTITY IN POOLISH	TOTAL RECIPE QUANTITY	BAKER’S PERCENTAGE
White flour	500 g	3¾ cups + 2 tbsp	500 g	1,000 g	100%
Water	250 g, 105ºF (41ºC)	1⅛ cups	500 g	750 g	75%
Fine sea salt	21 g	1 tbsp + 1 scant tsp	0	21 g	2.1%
Instant dried yeast	3 g	¾ tsp	0.4 g	3.4 g	0.34%
Poolish	1,000 g	All from recipe above			50%^*

Poolish
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
White flour	500 g	3¾ cups + 2 tbsp
Water	500 g, 80ºF (27ºC)	2¼ cups
Instant dried yeast	0.4 g	Scant ⅛ tsp

Final Dough			Baker’s Formula
INGREDIENT	FINAL DOUGH MIX QUANTITY		QUANTITY IN POOLISH	TOTAL RECIPE QUANTITY	BAKER’S PERCENTAGE
White flour	400 g	3 cups + 2 tbsp	500 g	900 g	90%
Whole wheat flour	100 g	¾ cup + ½ tbsp	0	100 g	10%
Water	280 g, 105ºF (41ºC)	1¼ cups	500 g	780 g	78%
Fine sea salt	21 g	1 tbsp + 1 scant tsp	0	21 g	2.1%
Instant dried yeast	3 g	¾ tsp	0.4 g	3.4 g	0.34%
Wheat germ	50 g	Scant ⅔ cup	0	50 g	5%
Wheat bran	20 g	⅓ cup + 1 tbsp	0	20 g	2%
Poolish	1,000 g	All from recipe above			50%^*

Biga
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
White flour	800 g	6¼ cups
Water	544 g, 80ºF (27ºC)	2⅓ cup
Instant dried yeast	0.64 g	3/16 tsp