Evolutions in Bread

Most of the recipes suggest the use of a levain as an optional ingredient. The recipes work well without it, but they will taste better with it. Yet there will be times when you don’t have this secret sauce available or haven’t made one yet. You can bake bread without it, don’t worry. Still, I recommend that you make a levain from scratch. It’s an

I like to time everything so my levain doughs are mixed in the late afternoon from a starter mixed that morning. For all the levain recipes except the Apple-Cider Levain Bread, if you mix the Day 2 starter at 8 a.m., the dough would be mixed 7 or 8 hours later. Five hours after that, at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m., it should be fully risen (up to about ½ inch

keeping with the French version, this loaf has a rustic look and a rougher blend of flours than a pure-white city bread. The flour blend of a country bread is up to the baker, and the leavening will be entirely or mostly from a levain.

We’re looking for that just-ripe point where it has the leavening power to ferment the dough. It’s also going to impart a balanced complexity of fermented flavors without being too sour. The sour would come if there was an excess of fermentation in the levain itself, like if we were to wait longer to mix dough from it.

Your freshly mixed levain weighs 450 grams. Each recipe in this book uses either 50 grams / ¼ cup or 100 grams / ½ cup of this culture. When it’s time to refresh the culture, use the same container as its permanent home. Don’t wash out the container; just remove all but 50 grams / ¼ cup of what is left in there, add more flour and water, and mix by

(Rye’s weaker gluten doesn’t hold as long, so aim for a little shorter cold proof time than the other breads.)

Whole-grain flour from a stone mill means exactly that—all the grain that runs through the mill goes into the bag of flour at the end of the process.

The right size for these recipes is 9 inches in diameter at the top and 3½ inches deep.

The white bread flour has a protein quality that allows for good gluten formation and gives your bread more rise and a lighter texture. You still get the flavor and nutrition of the emmer or einkorn.