I’ve been baking artisan bread as a hobby for just about a year now.
Like all my other hobbies, this hobby ebbs and flows with the amount of time I have. But unlike some of my other hobbies, I’ve been mindful of prioritizing more time to baking bread. I’ve named my rye sourdough starter Ronald, my instagram is almost all bread pictures, and yes, I have unfortunately started cancelling plans because of it.
Don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t completely taken over my life, but it has become a bigger part of my life.
Why?
It started with a skepticism towards all the negativity towards bread. I wanted to understand how bread, a staple of the human diet since the early Egyptians, one of our oldest and most relied on food sources in all corners of the world, could be so bad for our bodies.
Luckily, I wasn’t alone. Michael Pollan, the food author and journalist, explored this exact question in the episode titled “Air” of his four-part Netflix documentary series, Cooked.
My biggest takeaways were:
- The bread we eat today is completely different than the bread we ate 50+ years ago. The bread we get from supermarkets today starts with the only four ingredients you need — flour, water, salt, and yeast — and then adds a plethora of others to allow it to be mass produced in a very short time. For example, to keep the dough from shredding apart in the large industrial mixers, extra gluten is added to strengthen it. By adding more gluten and drastically decreasing the time to make bread (less time for chemistry to do its job), we have created these gluten monsters that our bodies have a hard time breaking down.
- Time is a crucial ingredient. Unfortunately, it has been neglected. Long-fermented breads allow the yeast and bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest. People with gluten intolerances have been shown to have no adverse effects from eating a truly long-fermented sourdough bread. Crazy!
Since I subscribe to the Michael Pollan philosophy on food — eat real food, mostly plants, not a lot — I knew that if I was going to continue eating bread, I should make an effort to eat real bread. Bread made with five ingredients: flour, water, salt, yeast, and most importantly, time.
How I would start today
Baking bread, especially sourdough, can seem overwhelming. All the precise tools, recipes using grams instead of cups, the manual mixing and kneading, feeding your starter, folding, proofing, baking. It’s feels way easier to just buy a loaf at the store.
If you’re trying to get to the level of a Tartine bread, then sure, it’s not going to be the easiest hobby to pick up. But that’s like starting to play basketball as a hobby and comparing yourself to Lebron James.
Its very hard to bake homemade bread and have it taste bad. I’ve completely forgotten to add salt in one of my early loaves. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, but the bread tasted ok especially after dipping it in a mixture of salt, olive oil, and garlic. If you’re baking at home just for yourself, your family, or your friends, then I can tell you right now, its not hard at all. The best way to get over that feeling of being overwhelmed is to find a reasonably easy recipe and dive right in. I’ve included some below.
Before you start, here are some helpful tips:
- Don’t start with a sourdough as your first loaf — I made the mistake of starting immediately with my own starter and baking a sourdough loaf. Sourdough is more finicky, requires more precision and understanding of some fundamentals, and overall has more places where something can go wrong. I wish I’d known that. My first 3 attempts with sourdough didn’t even make it to the baking stage and I almost gave up bread baking completely. Instead, I suggest starting with a regular long-fermented recipe (see below), where you’ll quickly bake great tasting bread and build up to making sourdough breads. There are so many variations of regular long-fermented breads that taste absolutely amazing. I didn’t switch to sourdough loaves until about a month ago, and I still regularly go back to regular long-fermented breads because they require less planning and time than a sourdough.
- Simple is better — I’m lazy. The idea of kneading dough, or buying a bread machine/kitchen-aid stand mixer was never going to happen. Luckily, I stumbled upon the concept of a no-knead recipe popularized by Jim Lahey. Some of the top bakers in the US that I get my recipes from (Ken Forkish, Chad Roberston) all use no-knead recipes. You don’t need any fancy or expensive machines, you are letting time do the hard work for you. #noneedtoknead
- Useful tools to have — I started my first few loaves without any one of following tools that I’ll describe. They are not required, but as you get more serious with baking bread, having these will make a big difference. All of these together will cost you less than $100 and they’re worth the investment. 1) Dutch oven — steam is a very important part of the baking process. Most of us don’t have a steam oven at home, and of all the ways to bake at home with steam, this is the easiest. Plus, a dutch oven can be used for so much more than just baking bread. 2) Digital Scale — measuring the ingredients using weight instead of cups, tbsp, etc allows for more consistency since various flours, salts, yeasts all weigh different amounts. 3) Instant read thermometer — Temperature will become your best friend (see #4 below) 4) Proofing basket/banneton — helps the dough keep its shape during the proofing process
- Time and Temperature are your best friends — The best way to control the natural chemistry that will be taking place is through temperature. If you need your bread to rise faster, or your starter to ripen faster, increase the temperature (and vice versa). This will make more sense as you get further into your bread baking journey but it helps to highlight this now so you’ll know why recipes list water and dough temperatures.
- Keep a bread log — The best way to learn is to take lots of notes along the way so you can learn and tweak your process each time. Writing down as many details as possible, temperatures, timings, how the dough felt or smelled, will all help you get more familiar with the process and begin adding your own touch to the breads you’re baking.
- Make half the recipe — Almost all of the recipes you’ll find, including the ones from the resources below, all use 1000g of flour. It makes the math for the baker’s percentages easy. Those recipes always have you divide the dough into two so you can either bake two loaves, or save one of the halves for pizza or focaccia. I did that a few times, but that’s a lot of dough and 99% of time I just wanted one loaf each week. Its super easy to just halve the recipes and start with 500g of flour.
My progression (with lots of resources)
After I almost gave up because of my early failed sourdoughs, I decided to start over. Here’s what I did and all the resources I found useful along the way.
- Jim Lahey’s No Knead recipe — (video recipe) I started with this super simple recipe. Remember, I didn’t have any of the useful tools I mentioned above so this recipe is perfect for that. Before I owned a dutch oven, I would flip a baking sheet upside down and bake on top of that with some wax paper. It wasn’t the best bread I have ever made, but it was always very good bread and it got me used to mixing dough with my hands and understanding the timing of the overnight ferment.
- Ken Forkish’s Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast — (book link) This was the best $30 I’ve spent and I can’t recommend this book enough. The whole book is dedicated only to baking long-fermented loaves (regular and sourdough) and is much more than a book of recipes. The foundational understanding of baking bread that I got from this book is exactly what I needed. Ken’s process is much more involved than Jim Lahey’s from above, but its for the better. I learned about the autolyse step, folding, controlling dough temperature, baker’s percentages, and lots more. When I bought this book I also bought the useful tools from above to complete my bread baking repertoire.
- Ken Forkish’s FWSY Videos —(videos link) I found these videos much later than I wish I had. Do yourself a favor and watch these early. The shaping video was the most helpful for me.
- Sourdough time! — After months of baking regular long-fermented and pre-ferment doughs, I finally decided to take a second shot at sourdoughs. First step, make my own starter. Although the Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast book has everything you need to build your own starter, the sourdough starter recipe doesn’t feel like it has the same focus on the home baker as the rest of the book did. I was making an unnecessarily large amount of starter and felt bad throwing away so much flour everyday (part of the feeding process). So I started hunting and found The Perfect Loaf website. This has become my goto for all things sourdough. Maurizio’s process feels very familiar to the process you’ll learn in Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast and he does such an awesome job explaining the details and including lots of great pictures. His guides for starting a starter and maintaining a starter are exactly what I needed. And once I developed a healthy starter, his beginner sourdough and his best sourdough recipes were the recipes I followed.
That’s it! If you’ve been thinking about starting to bake bread, I say do it. I hope you find this information helpful in starting your bread baking journey. This has been my favorite and most delicious hobby to date.
PS — If you’re already baking bread at home, check out my post on baking with my Tovala smart steam oven. Spoiler alert, baking in a steam oven is amazing.
