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

One of my common uses for this bread is tearing a couple of slices into croutons, lightly toasting them until slightly crisp, then tossing them in a mustardy vinaigrette, so the vinaigrette really soaks into the croutons, and then with fresh lettuces and a chopped hard-boiled egg. This bread is ideal for onion soup gratiné or ribollita. It’s also excellent spread with pâté or for sopping up sauce, not to mention for sandwiches or morning toast with butter and jam. I sometimes use this bread, very lightly toasted, as an alternative to burger buns.

THIS RECIPE MAKES 2 LOAVES, EACH ABOUT 1½ POUNDS.

BULK FERMENTATION: About 5 hours

PROOF TIME: 12 to 14 hours

SAMPLE SCHEDULE: Feed the levain at 8 a.m., mix the final dough at 3 p.m., shape into loaves at 8 p.m., proof the loaves in the refrigerator overnight, and bake around 8 to 10 a.m. the next morning.

^* The baker’s percentage for levain is the amount of flour in the levain 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.

The next morning, 12 to 14 hours after the loaves went into the refrigerator, they should be ready to bake, straight from the refrigerator. They don’t need to come to room temperature first.

If you only have 1 Dutch oven, keep the other loaf in the refrigerator while the first loaf is baking, and bake the loaves sequentially, giving the Dutch oven a 5-minute reheat after removing the first loaf.

Remove the preheated Dutch oven from your kitchen oven, remove the lid, and carefully place the loaf in the Dutch oven seam side up. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake for about 20 minutes, until dark brown all around the loaf. Check after 15 minutes of baking uncovered in case your oven runs hot.

Remove the Dutch oven and carefully tilt it to turn the loaf out. Let cool on a rack or set the loaf on its side so air can circulate around it. Let the loaf rest for at least 20 minutes before slicing.

WHAT IF THE DOUGH ISN’T AT THE TARGET TEMPERATURE?

If the final mix temperature is cooler than 77ºF (25ºC), don’t worry—it may just take longer to increase to 2½ times its original volume. Put the dough in a warm spot, and use warmer water next time you make the recipe. If the dough temperature is above 78ºF (26ºC), the dough will probably expand faster, depending on the temperature of your kitchen. Use cooler water next time you make the recipe.

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

The next morning, 12 to 13 hours after the loaves went into the refrigerator, they should be ready to bake, straight from the refrigerator. They don’t need to come to room temperature first.

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

1a. Feed the levain About 24 hours after your previous feeding of the levain, discard all but 100 grams of levain, leaving the remainder in your 6-quart tub. Add 400 grams of white flour, 100 grams of whole wheat flour, and 400 grams of water at 85°F to 90°F (29°C to 32°C) and mix by hand just until incorporated. Cover and let rest for 6 to 8 hours before mixing the final dough.

1b. Autolyse After 6 to 8 hours, mix the 800 grams of white flour and the 30 grams of wheat germ by hand in a 12-quart round tub. Add the 620 grams of 90°F to 95°F (32°C to 35°C) water and mix by hand just until incorporated. Cover and let rest for 20 to 30 minutes.

Put a container with about a finger’s depth of warm water on your scale so you can easily remove the levain after it’s weighed. With wet hands, transfer 360 grams of levain into the container.

Transfer the weighed levain to the 12-quart dough tub, minimizing the amount of water transferred with it. Mix by hand, wetting your working hand before mixing so the dough doesn’t stick to you. Use the pincer method alternating with folding the dough to fully integrate the ingredients. The target dough temperature at the end of the mix is 77°F to 78°F (25°C to 26°C).

The next morning, 12 to 14 hours after the loaves went into the refrigerator, they should be ready to bake, straight from the refrigerator. They don’t need to come to room temperature first.

Remove the preheated Dutch oven from your kitchen oven, remove the lid, and carefully place the loaf in the Dutch oven seam side up. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake for about 20 minutes, until medium dark brown all around the loaf. Check after 15 minutes of baking uncovered in case your oven runs hot.

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

Let the dough rest for 10 minutes, then spread the cooled walnuts over the top. Incorporate them into the dough, again using the pincer method alternating with folding until the walnuts are evenly distributed.

This is an excellent sandwich bread. You might also think of it as an accent flavor anywhere you use anything smoked, from smoked salt to smoked fish to smoked meats. If I were to try to build a New York pastrami-on-rye sandwich empire, this first Field Blend recipe is the bread I would use, tossing some caraway seeds into the dough.

THIS RECIPE MAKES 2 LOAVES, EACH ABOUT 1½ POUNDS.

BULK FERMENTATION: About 5 hours

PROOF TIME: About 12 hours

SAMPLE SCHEDULE: Feed the levain at 8 a.m., mix the final dough at 3 p.m., shape into loaves at 8 p.m., proof the loaves in the refrigerator overnight, and bake at around 8 a.m. the next morning.

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

1b. Autolyse After 6 to 8 hours, mix the 590 grams of white flour, the 60 grams of whole wheat flour, and the 150 grams of white rye flour by hand in a 12-quart round tub. Add the 590 grams of 90°F to 95°F (32°C to 35°C) water and mix by hand just until incorporated. Cover and let rest for 20 to 30 minutes.

Put a container with about a finger’s depth of warm water on your scale so you can easily remove the levain after it’s weighed. With wet hands, transfer 360 grams of levain into the container.

The next morning, about 12 hours after the loaves went into the refrigerator, they should be ready to bake, straight from the refrigerator. They don’t need to come to room temperature first.

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

5. Shape Doughs made with rye flour are stickier and need a bit more strengthening than doughs made without. To compensate, “preshape” your dough first: Sprinkle a little flour over the top of each piece, then flip them over, flour side down, and fold the dough by reaching under the mass and pulling floured sections of the dough over and across, eventually enclosing the sticky inner surface of the dough. Then, shape each piece of dough into a tight ball following these instructions. Place them on the counter seam side down and let rest for about 15 minutes.

The 3-Kilo Boule

It’s Wednesday, and this big, round boule of levain bread baked Monday morning—about 16 inches in diameter and weighing in at more than 6 pounds—may be at its best right now. Like all of my big levain loaves, the 3-kilo boule improves with age for several days after it’s been baked. There’s something unique about the way flavors develop in big loaves. The flavors integrate and mellow with time, the crumb remains soft, and the crust stays firm yet pliable. I love the variety of textures in this monster. The rich, earthy, sometimes slightly bitter flavor of the crust fascinates me when I think of the field of wheat it came from. The ingredients? Flour, water, salt, and yeast. Bet you saw that coming.

Breads of this size probably date back to times when people only had access to fresh bread one or two days each week and needed loaves large enough to last until the next baking day. There’s a connection to European village life, back to when bread was a dietary staple. Many villages weren’t big enough to support a bakery that was open every day of the week. Some villages had a communal oven that was fired once a week. Bread had to last until the next bake day, so the loaves were big—I mean really big. I have books with old photos of loaves that appear to be at least 3 feet in diameter. Prior to the twentieth century, bread made up a significant percentage of the calories in the average European diet. Back then, bread and baking were important in a way that’s hard to imagine today.

There remain many bakeries, mine included, that still bake large loaves for people who do not have everyday access to a bakery, or who know from experience that large loaves yield superior bread. In my case, almost all of these big fellas are delivered to a handful of good restaurants here in Portland.

I am fond of these large loaves for their historical link to a baking heritage that inspired my métier, and the 3-kilo (6.6-pound) boule of Country Blonde is the one bread I can truly call my own. I came up with the recipe for the bakery’s Country Brown bread to try to match loaves baked by the French bakers who inspired me—Poilâne, Poujauran, Kamir, Saibron, and other excellent Parisian bakers—despite the differences between the types of flour available in the United States and France. Country Brown is one of my personal favorites in 1.75-kilo (3.9-pound) boules, but the 3-kilo Country Blonde boule came more directly from my own inspiration and I therefore feel it is more my own bread, not my version of someone else’s bread.

In 2004, I traveled back to Paris for my first vacation since opening Ken’s Artisan Bakery. It was an opportunity to revisit the boulangeries that made me want to become a baker—and to give some long thought to the work we were doing in Portland. I wanted to make some changes to our Country Blonde bread, and on a long walk along the river Seine, I reflected on two principles: our big loaves almost always taste better than our smaller loaves; and my “less yeast and more time” mantra could be applied to make the Country Blonde more delicate and more complex in flavor. I also wanted to adopt a common practice among good French bakers: using a small percentage of rye flour to add earthiness and additional complexity to the flavor of the bread.

After I got home I tinkered with flour proportions (at the time I used four kinds of flour in the Country Blonde dough), the amount of levain and yeast, the timing, dough temperatures, and dough hydration. Meanwhile, I also experimented with large loaf sizes, going all the way up to 4 kilos of raw dough before finally deciding that the 3-kilo boule was ideal for several reasons—one deciding factor being the fact that anything bigger than a 3-kilo loaf wouldn’t fit in our delivery bags!

We bake the Country Blonde boules to a very deep, dark color, sometimes just shy of being burned, in order to get a very particular hit of flavor in the crust. When fully fermented and completely baked, these loaves take on shades of umber and dark crimson that aren’t in the typical American’s color palette for bread. But the flavor! Oh yeah. And the contrast in both taste and texture between the crust and the light alveolated crumb is sublime.

I started taking the big loaves of Country Blonde around to some of my friends at restaurants in Portland, and before long we were sending ten to fifteen of these behemoths to restaurants around town every day. Persuading the public to buy such big loaves is another story. Most people just don’t eat that much bread, so we sell the 3-kilo boules in quarters at the bakery.

In France, a big round loaf is sometimes called a miche, sometimes a boule (this is where the word boulangerie came from). The way this bread is used varies with its age, and some families won’t even touch the loaf until its second day. The rhythm of each week’s meals is sometimes determined, at least in part, by the age of the bread. Early on, it eats well plain, on its own or accompanying other foods. At any point in its life cycle, it’s superb when toasted, giving it an ideal crisp outer layer with tender middle bits. But its uses get more interesting with age: bread puddings both savory and sweet, including one of my favorites, summer pudding, made with fresh berries and topped with crème fraîche or whipped cream; slices or chunks of toasted bread topped with soup or stew; bread crumbs, of course, as a topping, in fillings, or for coating battered foods before frying; or, for the ambitious, in winter, as a topping for cassoulet. Of course there are also croutons and crostini, topped with anything you can imagine. Recently I came across an Italian recipe for bread balls that sounds great: old bread pieces soaked overnight in milk, then squeezed out and mixed with a custard of milk, eggs, grated Parmesan, and chopped sage; finally, the mixture is formed into balls and deep-fried. Yum! Peasant food excels at using old bread to good advantage, letting nothing go to waste.

On a recent vacation in Montana where I rented a ranch house in the Centennial Valley, I brought two boules of Country Blonde, one for my hosts and the other to get me through seven days of cooking my own meals. Seven days after it was baked, I was still enjoying the bread for toast, croutons, and any other kind of wheaty ballast. I also soaked some torn pieces in cream and sugar and topped them with berries for a dessert.

If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on this kind of large loaf, you’ll probably wonder what the best way to store it is. The ideal is to let it sit out for the first day, then quarter it and store it at room temperature in a plastic bag for the remainder of its life: up to eight days.

If you want to try baking the 3-kilo boule’s home kitchen cousin, the 1.8-kilo (4-pound) boule, see the variation for Overnight Country Blonde, which you can also apply to the dough for Overnight Country Brown.

Levain
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
Mature, active levain	100 g	⅓ cup + 1½ tbsp
White flour	400 g	3 cups + 2 tbsp
Whole wheat flour	100 g	¾ cup + ½ tbsp
Water	400 g, 85ºF to 90ºF (29ºC to 32ºC)	1¾ cups

Final Dough			Baker’s Formula
INGREDIENT	FINAL DOUGH MIX QUANTITY		QUANTITY IN LEVAIN	TOTAL RECIPE QUANTITY	BAKER’S PERCENTAGE
White flour	740 g	5¾ cups	160 g	900 g	90%
Whole wheat flour	60 g	½ cup + ½ tbsp	40 g	100 g	10%
Water	620 g, 90ºF to 95ºF (32ºC to 35ºC)	2¾ cups	160 g	780 g	78%
Fine sea salt	21 g	1 tbsp + 1 scant tsp	0	21 g	2.1%
Instant dried yeast	2 g	½ tsp	0	2 g	0.2%
Levain	360 g	1⅓ cups			20%^*

Levain
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
Mature, active levain	100 g	⅓ cup + 1½ tbsp
White flour	400 g	3 cups + 2 tbsp
Whole wheat flour	100 g	¾ cup + ½ tbsp
Water	400 g, 85ºF to 90ºF (29ºC to 32ºC)	1¾ cups

Final Dough			Baker’s Formula
INGREDIENT	FINAL DOUGH MIX QUANTITY		QUANTITY IN LEVAIN	TOTAL RECIPE QUANTITY	BAKER’S PERCENTAGE
White flour	90 g	½ cup + 3 tbsp	160 g	250 g	25%
Whole wheat flour	710 g	5½ cups + ½ tbsp	40 g	750 g	75%
Water	660 g, 90ºF to 95ºF (32ºC to 35ºC)	2⅞ cups	160 g	820 g	82%
Fine sea salt	21 g	1 tbsp + 1 scant tsp	0	21 g	2.1%
Instant dried yeast	1.75 g	Scant ½ tsp	0	1.75 g	0.175%
Levain	360 g	1⅓ cups			20%^*

Levain
INGREDIENT	QUANTITY
Mature, active levain	100 g	⅓ cup + 1½ tbsp
White flour	400 g	3 cups + 2 tbsp
Whole wheat flour	100 g	¾ cup + ½ tbsp
Water	400 g, 85ºF to 90ºF (29ºC to 32ºC)	1¾ cups