Evolutions in Bread

Try Rouge de Bordeaux or Sonoran White wheat in my recipes written for emmer and einkorn flour, or try substituting in recipes that call for whole-wheat or spelt flour.

I introduced a slight hiccup in this book by having most recipes use an optional 100 grams of refrigerated levain. The recipes work with or without it (but they taste better with it!). Using this 100 grams of sourdough to flavor the loaf will slightly change the baker’s percentages in the recipes compared with not using it. To ease the understandin

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

This three-stage starter buildup keeps it from being too sour, and the long overnight cold proof of the dough is like a flavor lab creating layer upon layer of bread magic.

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.

My goal is for the levain culture to build up a large yeast population without getting too much fermentation activity early in the process—an excess of fermentation will produce acetic acids, the source of “sour” in sourdough. The best way to get to my desired mellow levain is to start with a very small amount of culture and feed it with good-quali

In my recipes, it isn’t necessary to dissolve the dried yeast first. These doughs have a lot of water in them, so the yeast dissolves rapidly in the dough. Just sprinkle it on top and incorporate as you mix with a wet hand.

If you are using the refrigerated levain, I found it works well to include it in the autolyse mixture—it takes a long time for its yeast to wake up and it integrates easier at this stage.

Cold Storage When you won’t be baking for a few weeks or more, you’ll need a storage routine to hold the levain in a kind of suspension until you are ready to bring it back. I’ve held cultures in my refrigerator for a couple of months and then successfully restored them. There are many methods. Here’s what works for me. Remove 200 grams / 1 cup of