bakers are such nice people's blog

These steps are the ones I follow to make my daily bread.  There is always (a) a starter being fed, (b) a bowl with dough or batter in it on the counter, and (c) a basket or two in the fridge, in my kitchen. 

Can someone tell me which of these steps is unneeded or even harmful to the production of great bread?  I would appreciate any tweaks or deletions or additions that might be suggested. 

The Steps

Pour starter from its vessel into my bowl.

Add lukewarm water and AP flour to make a batter.

Let that sit for a few hours or overnight.

Add flours to make a dough, salt also.

Give three hours to the act of half-hourly folding.

Shape loaves & into proofing baskets.

Refrigerate overnight.

Pull from fridge and let sit while oven reaches temp.  Turn oven on now.

Preheat oven to 500 with dutch ovens inside while loaves sit on counter, post fridge.

Place loaves in dutch ovens.

Bake at 500 for 10 to 15, then at 450 for 35 to 40.

Cool until cool.

Any cool magic tricks out there?

Some say he was the son of God.  Others say he was just a man.  Others, a myth.  This thought has nothing to do with that argument, but with a moment in the story of the last supper that is worth some thought.

First of all, skin.  Snakes, when they are ready to use their new skin, peel out of their old flesh and leave a beautiful treasure for a kid to find and pin to the wall.  We humans are not so graceful as snakes; our skin we leave in flakes and bits in the air, the tabletop, everywhere.  5 people in a car are all breathing one another in, literally inhaling one another's flesh, between home and their destination.  And so,

If we can imagine a last supper with bread and wine, and if we can accept that Jesus may have made the bread he shared at that meal--or even if not, that he broke the bread with his hands when he said "this is my body"--that it actually was his body.

This image, of the hands of farmers, of millers, of bakers, all leaving themselves in and on the loaf that sits before me on the table, is far from grotesque--it is an image of community, which ends with unity.  Yes, yes, baking surely burns out all the bits tat might be yucky to think about, but not the flavor.  El Sabor.  We eat bread and we can quite literally taste our own humanity.

Hydration.  Water.  When I was a kid one summer I fell out on a tennis court in the 100 degree Florida sunshine, my body exhausted by the heat and lack of hydration.  My childhood was spent at the beach--for this family with five children, the free beaches of Florida were a perfect summer solution.  The salt water in that wild Atlantic and its neighbor, the sleepy Gulf of Mexico, always in my imagination housed Hydra--the mythical beast who grew two heads back whenever one was chopped off. 

Getting dough right feels like that for me, in part by design.  Feeling my way to a right tackiness, to a certain moisture, to a taut surface on a shaped loaf--the beast of time and environment, ambient humidity and temperature, the absorption qualities in the flour . . . corrections made to one informs conditions in the others.  The dance is confusing, hilarious, rewarding.  The process is a perfect example how mastery cannot be taught, only learned.  And for me, anyway, learning is slow.

The breads I am making right now are really tricking me in the Hydra moment.  One day I will get a great spring, a big, bulbous loaf.  The very next day the same dough with an additional day in the fridge will spring OUT and make a two inch tall disc -- still delicious, still rich with big lovely cells in the crumb . . . but not big and bulbous -- and this is a matter of wet dough, is it not?  I wrestle with it, try multiple sprays through the early bake to keep it very wet -- and sacrificing oven temp every time I open that door!  Hydra strikes again!

One of the comments on my first post points out that people have been feeling their way to bread for --well, forever-- that not everyone reaches for their digital scale.   So true.  And while I do not mean to suggest that any of what I am up to is novel (much time reading this website and its posts show me a world of brilliant adventure far beyond my rejection of teaspoons and scales) it is certainly novel for me, in that humbling way in which it is a beautiful thing to be reminded repeatedly by the Hydra that I am outmatched by breadmaking, outnumbered and outgunned.  How lovely to know a lifetime of battling the Hydra awaits -- and that that battle is -- it is -- more like a dance than a fight.

After 3 years of baking a number of breads from sources like Complete Book of Breads and Breadbaker's Apprentice, I stopped pulling the measuring gear, volume or weight, out of the cabinets when I set out to make bread.  I use the same mixing bowl every time so that the visual information I receive is always in the same format, and then I bring together flours at my whim--KA AP, KA B, rye, whole wheat . . . and very recently the great -- GREAT -- line of flours from Castle Valley Mill in Doylestown PA.  Truly great products.  The image for this post is a loaf made completely with their flours.  The one beside it is about one fifth KA AP or so.

Between my eyes, my taste buds, and my fingertips, we arrive at our desired colors and hydration.  I almost never add anything beyond the flours, water, salt, and my home starter, nurtured with love.  I do follow the ideas I have gleaned from many of you in my time reading this site--ideas about time and temperature, about steam and overnight refrigeration, about when to shape and how/when to introduce salt.  I have learned a great deal from my place of silence here and I thank you for that.

While my method means I do not make the 'same' bread twice, the fact is that I have developed a sense of what I am looking for and so I am able to arrive within a narrow range, sometimes a bit more sour, sometimes a bit better crumb, but like a ceramic artist during the glaze fire: awaiting a surprise when I pull my loaves from the oven.  Speaking of ovens:  as a renter I was always at the mercy of the gas or electric that came with the house.  For home baking, and short of my own brick oven that I will someday build, the gas oven I have now (and Electrolux Icon) is more than satisfactory in terms of heat and balance.  As with most home ovens, steam is a continuing challenge.

I teach at a liberal arts college and this semester will teach a First Year Seminar on Bread.  I am nervous about entering this subject (I am a Sculpture prof) but feel armed with the amazing wealth of information, history, myth, and culture surrounding this simple and magical staple.  People regard bread making as a kind of alchemy, but you all know better than anyone that it is in fact more like gardening than like turning lead into gold.  From the planting to the reaping to the milling to the building to the baking to the breaking . . . it asks that we tend it, that we attend to it, that we give it our attention.  And so a note on my username--I love that bread is a thing that it is good to break, because when we break bread we repair ourselves to one another.

Happy Baking and Breaking -- Nestor