Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day

This starter comes together in two stages: first, you’ll create the seed culture, then you’ll convert it to a mother starter. In the first stage, you aren’t making the starter that actually goes into your dough; you’re making a starter (the seed) that makes another starter (the mother), from which you’ll make your final dough.

When you really think about it, long, cold, delayed fermentation turns bread dough into its own pâte fermentée. In many instances, in fact, it may be redundant and not at all enhancing to add a pre-ferment to an overnight dough that undergoes delayed fermentation. Using a soaker, in which coarse grain is soaked overnight to induce enzyme activity a

Pain au levain, for instance, is a classic French-style naturally leavened (wild yeast) bread that’s usually made with a small percentage of whole wheat flour but can also be made with 100 percent whole wheat flour or none at all, or with a touch of rye.

As a general rule, you need to increase the liquid by about 1 tablespoon (0.5 oz / 14 g) for every 2 ounces (56.5 g) of whole grain flour you substitute in place of white flour.

The 4.4-pound (2-kilo) country miche, made famous by Max and Lionel Poilâne in Paris, is made with sifted whole wheat flour. Sifting removes some of the germ and bran, but not all of it, so the bread is hearty but not overwhelmingly so. This can be approximated at home by using about 60 percent whole wheat flour and 40 percent unbleached bread flou

Typically, a difference of 17°F (about 10°C) will effectively double (or halve, depending on which direction you go) the rate of fermentation. Thus, dough that doubles in size in 2 hours at 70°F (21°C) will take 1 hour to double at 87°F (31°C) and 4 hours at 53°F (12°C). This doesn’t apply to dough that’s cooler than 40°F (4°C), where yeast goes so

Traditional rye breads are often made with wild yeast starter to acidify the dough, which yields a better-tasting and more digestible rye loaf. Because rye is low in gluten, rye breads often include some high-gluten white flour to compensate for the lack of gluten. Many commercial rye breads are made using a mixed method that incorporates both a wi

For some of the breads, especially rustic breads, the dough needs to be sticky to achieve a large hole structure. Sticky means that the dough sticks to a dry finger when you poke the dough. However, for the majority of the recipes in this book, tacky dough is the goal. Tacky dough behaves sort of like a Post-it note, sticking to a surface but peeli