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Making bread, great bread, takes some planning ahead and some dough babysitting. It's work worth doing, but sometimes you need bread fast. That's why I'm seeking the "minimum effective dose" for success. I heard this term coined in The 4 Hour Chef by Timothy Ferriss. It's not a groundbreaking concept, but he revolves much of his life around its pursuit, which is intriguing. He wants to find the balance of the best you can do with the least amount of work.

Last Sunday I held my third annual Bread Tasting Open House. This year I focused on a couple of areas - 100% rye flour breads, and a series of sourdoughs using different flours. For the latter the formula / recipe / technique was the same for all six of the breads; the only variation was that 25% of the flour was different. The six were:

So, you've seen some sexy artisan bread pics...maybe on Instagram or Pinterest and you realize the loaves were all made by ordinary folks. You think, "Hey, that looks good. I want to make some bread, too." Here's my perspective on how you can get started with the least amount of pain. I'll tell you right now, it's not how I got started, which is why I know exactly what I'm talking about. I flew too close to the sun too fast, and it cost me quite a bit of angst, flour, and sanity. Here's the easier way for those interested in the hearth-style/artisan breads.

After making multiple Tartine loaves, I decided to add some commercial yeast as insurance and to get a better crumb (wish I had taken a pic of the inside). This was definitely the best crumb bread I've made yet.

For a one-loaf recipe (500g flour), I dissolved 1/8 tsp commercial yeast into the 25g of water.  I added this yeast-water with the salt after autolyse. 3.5 hour bulk ferment and retarded final rise in fridge overnight.

Worked out amazing and still had the same flavor.

Hello, TFL'ers!

One of my new year's goals was to take a stab at sourdough baguettes and I finally had the chance to give it a try. I followed the recipe / method here with a few modifications:

 Me and my friend both worked in leadership in a big box store- she began talking about opening a bakery and soon it became the topic of most of our discussions. Id never made much that didnt come out of a box and she was a hardcore scratchmade hobbyist. Fast forward a year later, her husband died unexpectedly leaving her with two young kids. It was a hard time for her, and she left the big box world to try and recover. She began texting me several months later, asking me if I would be interested in helping her start up a bakery. I said yes, and we opened in November of last year.

this was my attempt at fwsy white loaf with 80% biga. The taste and crumb are wonderful, I'm just so disappointed with the oven spring. The loaf on the left was proved in an ova, banneton and just flattened out horribly, the baguette in the middle was lovely so I ate most of that before I remembered to take pictures. The loaf on the right, I did in a round banneton. Apart from the rise on it I'm very happy. I will try again but because it's so wet, I may just continue with the white bread with poolish as my go to recipe.

The plan was to return some sort of normalcy to my baking this weekend. I was going to find a nice formula, dust off my scales and bake a loaf that I could actually say whats in it. .

It didn’t happen that way. I was running late and I needed to start the first stage of my levain build before I left for work so I ended up just throwing together some flour, water and starter. I think the last couple of bakes gave me the confidence to know that it’ll all work out.

Hello,

lately I've been having issues with my crumb. I haven't changed anything in my baking process.Flour, temps, leaven or folding is all the same. The only difference is the season.

As you can see, the top part of my loaf has a very large air pocket. This doesn't happen all the time and mostly with larger loafs (3,5 Lb)