Crumb

The top of the dough will have a natural smooth skin forming over it, and by ensuring the top is always on top and the bottom on the bottom you are in control. It is a small detail, but a huge step in understanding the way that dough behaves.

The dough will feel very sticky at first, but trust in the technique, take your time and keep mixing until there are no dry bits and the sides of the bowl become clean all the way around with no flour showing. The temptation is to rush this stage, but the more work you do in the bowl the better.

The reason I suggest leaving the dough to rest until ‘just under’ rather than double in size, which is the usual instruction, is that I find it helps people to pay attention and guard against reaching this deflating stage.

Put the flour in a large bowl, break up the yeast on one side of the bowl and place the salt on the other side. It is important to keep them apart as they are both powerful and if mixed together the salt will suck all the moisture from the yeast and they will both ‘die’.

You can experiment with most of the yeasted recipes in this book by substituting some of the fresh commercial yeast with some ferment, in a ratio of 10g of ferment to 1g of fresh commercial yeast. So if a recipe calls for 20g of commercial yeast, try just using 10g and adding 100g of ferment, then, as you feel more confident you can keep increasing

In my classes I call this technique taking the dough for a walk, because it really helps if you walk up and down as you do this.

Instead of kneading the dough, I prefer to talk about ‘working it’ in a way that incorporates as much air as possible and, rather than ‘knocking it back’, I have a more gentle way of folding it into a ball.

if your body is cold you put on a jumper, have a warm drink and try to keep your room cosy, and if you are too hot you do the opposite – think of looking after the dough in a similar way and the more you bake the more you will find yourself making those kinds of small adjustments automatically.

From then on, bakers began to abandon the technique of bashing and kneading, in favour of a new method, using a much softer dough. Once the ingredients were mixed (le frasage) with a greater quantity of water – still in a big trough which could hold 100 kilos of dough – the dough was usually left for a while (an early example of the autolyse method