The Perfect Loaf

Use the inoculation percentage to regulate the ripening timeline for your starter—in fact, the inoculation percentage is the most important variable I modify to synchronize my starter with my daily schedule because it’s effective and easy to control. Simply put, the more starter carryover used in your refreshment, the faster it will ferment. Is you

I WROTE THIS BOOK AS A GUIDE TO TEACHING you how to think like a baker, not follow a recipe.

TOTAL FORMULA TABLE A snapshot of the bread you’re making: the ingredients you’ll need to mix the dough and the percentages of each ingredient in baker’s math (which means all ingredients are a percentage of the total flour in the recipe). With this one table, you can get an intuitive feel for the bread before you even begin (see more about baker’s

VITALS TABLE First, the vitals table gives you up front the important information about the bread you’re about to bake. It’s another way for a baker to get a feel for the bread before they even begin. Over time, these terms will carry significance for you when reading bread formulas. (See Baker’s Percentages, this page, for more on these percentage

In a starter, cold temperatures drastically slow the fermentation activity, and reducing the hydration deprives them of a necessary component for metabolic activity—water. When placing your starter in the refrigerator for short-term storage, also reducing the hydration, even just 20%, seems to help it handle the cooler temperatures better and sprin

As your starter ferments the flour, at some point (about 12 hours for the process described in this book) more fresh flour needs to be added so the microbes have a continued food source.

DOUGH TABLES These tables are found at the autolyse and mixing steps. If the recipe doesn’t have an autolyse, you’ll simply find one table with all the dough ingredients needed for mixing: levain plus flour, water, salt, etc. If it does have an autolyse, you’ll find a separate table where all the flour and most of the water (usually all of Water 1)

The following refreshment ratios are the smallest I’d feel comfortable maintaining while still being able to mix a dough at a moment’s notice. Sure, it’s possible to go even smaller, but the following will provide you with about 50g of starter ready to create a levain for many of the recipes in this book (and if you need more, you can scale up your

Small microblisters on loaves that are proofed overnight at a cold temperature