I love baking because I can pretty consistently get predictable results by following a recipe. Sure, there’s some improvisation, but it tends to be circumstantial–I forgot something on the grocery list, or we want cookies now so let’s not wait for room temp butter. Bread, though, I’ve never seen as in that realm. It’s unpredictable, subject to the whims of humidity and time. I’ve had good but not great success with it over the years.

All that said, it’s bread. I could wax poetic about how important it is to human history, but that seems unnecessary. If you’ve torn into a good piece of bread, you know it doesn’t have to be perfectly made to be the perfect accompaniment to… itself. Or basically anything. Our duck readers know what I’m talking about.

So, since the new year, I’ve been spending the weekends kneading, proofing, and slicing my way to a reliable, simple loaf of crusty white bread. This was borne out of failure, some overly-ambitious sprouted whole grain loaves that just literally fell flat and made me want to get back to basics. I’ve done the no-knead thing before and loved it, but sometimes we decide less than 24 hours in advance that bread would go well with a meal. This recipe still needs time though: you’re looking at about six to seven hours from start to finish, though there’s plenty of that when you’re letting microbes do all the heavy lifting.

There’s a variety of pieces of equipment mentioned in here, but the vast majority can be improvised except for the kitchen scale (weight is just so much more precise than volume when it comes to flour) and the Dutch oven. We’ve got this Lodge one, and it’s a boon to keeping things hydrated during the baking process. Plus you can use it for countless other recipes! I also use a stand mixer with a dough hook for mixing and kneading, but mixing with a wooden spoon and kneading by hand work fine too.

 

Makes 2 boules (round loaves)

 

Ingredients

• 700g water (room-temp or lukewarm)
• 1000g all-purpose flour (and a bit more for dusting your surface)
• 15g salt
• 4g instant yeast
• Oil (vegetable or olive) to grease a bowl

 

Recipe

Measure, Mix, and Knead

1. Using your kitchen scale, weigh out your water into the mixer bowl. Re-tare the scale and weigh out your flour into the water.
2. Mix the flour and water thoroughly using the mixer’s dough hook. Stop once the dough looks consistent (about 2-3 minutes at a low speed).
3. Place a kitchen towel over the bowl to prevent things drying out, and leave the dough for 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile, you can weigh out your salt and yeast.

4. Add the salt and yeast, then knead the dough for about 5 minutes. Test it by touching and pulling on a piece–it will still feel a bit tacky and might stick to your fingers, but it will also stretch and feel elastic.

Bulk Rise

5. Prep a large bowl (big, like at least twice as big as your dough) with some oil, then transfer the dough from the mixer to the oiled bowl. Don’t just pull it out–it should be sticking to the mixer bowl a bit, so slide a rubber spatula to gently coax it out of the bowl and avoid the dough tearing.
6. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and put it in a room temp/ever-so-slightly-warmish place for 30 minutes.
7. Oil your hands and fold the dough. To do this, pull gently on one edge of the dough until you have a flap about the size of the main part of the dough, then pull it over the main part. Pat it slightly to make it stick, then rotate the bowl a quarter turn. Do the same folding process 3 more times so that you’ve folded every edge of your squarish dough, then flip the dough over in the bowl so your folds are on the bottom.

8. Re-cover the bowl with plastic wrap. I recommend taking a picture here so you remember how big the dough is at this point.
9. Let the dough rise for another 90 minutes to two hours. It should get to be about double in volume–check that picture you snapped to confirm.

 

Shaping and Proofing

10. Flour a work surface and dump out the dough, using a rubber spatula again to coax it out of the bowl without tearing.
11. Split the dough in half with a bench scraper or knife. You can use the kitchen scale to weigh and be sure it’s even. Each ball of dough should be around 850g.
12. For each ball of dough, use a similar folding technique to what you used in the bowl earlier, folding 4 times, then flip it over. Now, with the folds on the bottom of the ball of dough, hold the ball on the sides and turn it in your hands, using the outside edges of your hands to gently pull the surface of the dough down away from the top of the ball. You’re turning and gathering the dough at the bottom of the ball at the same time. Do this for a couple of revolutions of the ball until the top of the ball seems taught, then sprinkle a bit of flour on top.

13. Cover the balls with a kitchen towel and wait 15 minutes.
14. Meanwhile, prep your proofing vessels. If you’ve got proofing baskets, you’ll just need to sprinkle some flour in there. If not, you just need two round vessels about the same size. I’ve got a bowl and a colander that are very close, and they work just fine. Sprinkle some flour on a cloth napkin or tea towel (nothing too fuzzy that might let off into the dough), then place that into the vessel.  
15. Very gently pick up your dough ball (you may need a bench scraper to coax it away from the surface) and put it upside-down into the proofing vessels, so that nice taught top is facing the bottom of the vessel and the folded side is up.
16. Fold your cloth to cover the dough, and put it in the fridge for about 2 hours till you’re ready to bake. To make sure it’s ready, push your thumb into the dough gently–if it pops back after a moment, you should be good to go.

Bake

17. About 30 minutes before your dough is ready, put your Dutch oven in your oven and preheat to 500°F. I’ve been putting my pizza stone in beneath this to help with heat retention as you open the oven later, but this may not be completely necessary.

18. As the oven heats, get things ready–you’ll need your oven mitts (that Dutch oven is going to be very hot), a knife, razor blade, or lame to slice the top of the bread, and some water, either in a spray bottle or in a bowl or cup that you can get ready to splash into the Dutch oven.
19. Once everything is preheated and your dough is out of the fridge, it’s time! Remove the Dutch oven and take off the lid.
20. Moving swiftly but carefully, tilt the dough into the center of the Dutch oven. Splat! It’s already starting to bake.
21. Now the taught top of the dough is facing up, so using your blade, make an incision at an angle over about ⅔ of the dough. Do another perpendicular to this. You can get fancy with different incisions, but two crossed lines or two smaller parallel lines will get enough of a vent in the dough that it will work just fine.

22. Finally spritz some water (either from your spray bottle or just flinging water from wet fingertips) all around the interior of the dutch oven and on top of the dough. It’ll sizzle right away, so be fast!
23. Put the lid back on the Dutch oven and put it back into the oven.
24. After 15 minutes, turn the heat down to 430°F. This temp may vary, but this has been giving me the right amount of browning.
25. After another 15 minutes, remove the lid from the Dutch oven. It should look somewhat browned, but still kind of pale. To keep the helpful heating retention of the lid, keep it in the oven. I just put it on top of the pizza stone. 

26. After another 15 minutes, it’s ready! If it doesn’t seem brown enough for you, give it another 5-10, but just be careful you don’t overdo it (the bottom is likely more done than the top at this point). Take the Dutch oven out of the oven and carefully remove the loaf–I just tilt the Dutch oven until the loaf falls out onto a cooling rack. Tap the bottom of the loaf, listening for the hollow thunk that means the loaf is ready.
27. Put your Dutch oven back together in the oven, reheat to 500°F, and return to step 19 to bake your second loaf.
28. Wait about 45-60 minutes after baking before tearing into the loaves. It’s a nearly inhuman test of patience, but you definitely want the interior to finish before you slice up your fabulous, fresh loaf of crusty white bread!

Two key lessons from this recipe: first, most bread recipes are basically the same–what changes is the ratio of water to the total amount of flour. In this case, it’s a 70% hydration (the water is 70% the weight of the flour used). Other flours or desired textures will use more or less water, and mixing things in can change it as well, but this is a basic, simple loaf that you can experiment with once you’ve got it down.

Second, this may not turn out perfect the first time around, but truly keep trying! I made this 3 weekends in a row before I was happy with my timing and process, but now it’s something I can replicate with pretty consistent, satisfying results. That feels like an emotional win for someone who recognizes his perfectionist tendencies. Now we’re getting fancy, starting to add in other flavors like rosemary and olives and mess with sourdough starters instead of the yeast, so I’ll definitely be posting more bread recipes in the future.

Recommended Reading

Max Bernstein’s blog post series over on Serious Eats is a very helpful deep dive into the science of every step of the bread-making process.