The Baker's Process

If baking bread was a book, these are the chapters with which every loaf of bread is told, er... made.

The chapters range in size and complexity but never in order, even between each recipe. We developed this system of thinking because it not only helps you gauge where you are in the process, but what to expect next, and ultimately help you in crafting your own recipes.

There are seven chapters. Only seven? Well, yes. We spent a lot of time trying to decide how to categorize all these different steps and whether or not it was even worth it. After all, the sheer variety in something as simple as flour, water, salt, and starter is immense! Bagels, pizza dough, rustic boules, baguettes, whole meal ryes, pure white sandwich loaves, the list goes on and on, and that's not even including additional ingredients! How could you possibly funnel them all into the same seven section process?

We're so brave. No, we didn't invent this out of whole cloth. There are other examples of a similar idea that many bakers have used to describe the process, and generally bakers think in terms of blocks and methods since the process spans such a long time compared to regular cookery. While each particular dough - just like each particular environment - must be considered, what the Baker's Process provides is a general guiding path. Let's say you've only made a classic white loaf of sourdough but want to dip your toes into a more whole wheat category, or raise the hydration for a more open crumb, or add different components like toasted seeds, porridges, or fats. Each new addition requires a slightly different methodology to get the best outcome and these are reflected in the steps and timing, and then all of a sudden you're looking at a recipe twice the length you expected with dread in your eyes. However, each of those steps and time changes still fall into the broader categories of the seven chapter Baker's Process. If you made a really basic loaf and are moving on to tougher terrain, at least you have a general guide to recognizing where you are on your journey so you can compare and contrast.

We're going to go over each of these chapters, why they're important, why we broke them up this way, and why it's helpful from beginners to pros.

The Seven Chapters of the Baker's Process

1. PREPARATION

2. MIX

3. BULK FERMENTATION

4. SHAPE

5. PROOF

6. BAKE

7. POST-BAKE

PREPARATION

It seems like this should go without saying, but I wrote this chapter

because I might be the worst

preparer ever. I tend to make bread by setting a bowl up on a scale, free-pouring ingredients into it, and roll with whatever mistakes I made during the free-pouring process. "Looks like this dough will be 82% hydration instead of 75%..." Least scientific process ever. This is not to say you can't have a good experience or loaf of bread at the end doing it this way, but this is how I learned to make sourdough, and that led to enough bricks to build a small house over the course of nearly two years.

For a normal person, this step is when you gather all your tools, measure all your ingredients, check to make sure your leaven is ready to go, and do any other preliminary prep that needs to be done. This chapter can be anywhere from 1 step to 8, depending on the type of bread you're making. For a simple loaf of sourdough, there are simple ingredients, but some more complex loaves will require you to toast seeds, or sprout some seeds, make a porridge, ferment that porridge overnight, scald some rye flour and let it cool, or all of the above! As you can see, the timing and steps between the two loaves just on this first chapter can range drastically. That's why it's important to review the recipe and be prepared, Aaron...

MIX

You probably know what happens here. This is when the wet meets the dry. It's the time when you finally feel like you're beginning to make a loaf of bread. These are the first steps forward in the journey and the timer has started, so to speak. There's a lot of cool stuff that happens here, the most important being that the proteins and enzymes in the flour are being hydrated and therefore ACTIVATED.

The enzyme doing the most heavy lifting here is called Amylase. This little enzyme contributes in the self-destruction of cells, or Autolysis. This is something most living things have in some cells - or other comparable enzymes - to break down whichever part of the organism they're a part of when it's not needed anymore or the energy is needed in a new form elsewhere. Humans also have it in our mouths to help begin breaking down our food, how cool is that!?

This self-destruction process is halted in wheat and flour when the wheat berry dries up, but as soon as it hydrates, the enzymes wake up and get to work deconstructing the endosperm (the starchy stuff that we turn into white flour) and breaks it into tiny little sugar chains - or, energy - for the plant to absorb and grow into a full blown wheat plant! However, when we grind these dried seeds, we take away the structure and ability for it to turn into a plant, but the enzymes keep doing their thang. Aside from turning starches into sugar for your starter to gobble up, another enzyme called Protease is snipping long protein chains like... gluten!

Gluten is a combination of two proteins called glutenin and gliadin. When their environment is hydrated they begin to smash and tangle and snuggle up together. Think about two steel wool scrubbies rubbing together and creating a tangled rats web. It gets harder and harder to pull apart. Kneading encourages this process, but really it will just happen on its own over time.

All of this is happening within the first hour of you initially mixing water into flour, and then you add your bubbly starter and the real magic happens.

BULK FERMENTATION

This is the fun part. With the exception of folding the dough on to itself a couple times here and there, this chapter mostly requires you to watch in awe as the once goopy sticky mess begins to balloon in the bowl, slowly growing larger and actually feeling like it's full of millions of tiny little air bubbles. That's because it is!

The yeasts and bacteria in the starter have been distributed throughout your dough and are now eating the sugars the enzymes in the hydrated flour have prepared for them. The yeasts divide and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide, and the bacteria also divide - at a much higher rate - and poop out lactic acid. This lowers the overall pH of the dough, making it progressively more and more inhospitable to microbes that we don't want. This is a pretty intense simplification of the process, but it highlights the main things we look for in a healthy dough.

This can go on for hours and hours. You basically sit back and watch the microbes work for you. You watch it rise, you encourage the growth with certain folds, and smell the wonderfully complex aromas. At a certain point, you'll begin to note a strong smell of sourness. Along with a couple other assurance tests, this is the sign to move on to the next chapter.

SHAPE

Now it is time for the dough to leave the comfort of its bowl and take a spill out onto your work surface: the bench (what us normies call the countertop).

With your bulk dough now slowly sagging and spreading on the bench, you begin the more hands-on portion of the process: dividing, pre-shaping, bench resting, and final shaping.

You would only divide this dough if you'd made enough for multiple loaves, hence why the previous stage we call "bulk", wherein it's not just where the bulk of the fermentation happens, it's also where what will become many separate loaves are all fermenting together.

Pre-shaping is something many bakers do to get each individual loaf into the rough shape that it will end up becoming, especially if you're carving each loaf off of a huge mass of dough on the counter. Depending on how ready your dough is for proofing (final rest before baking) some bakers choose to omit this part, while others say it's essential, as well as the bench rest.

Bench rest is a short time you give each loaf after pre- or final-shaping so the structure has time to rest and loosen. When you roll and tug and stretch and mash the dough onto itself, you're tearing and creating new gluten bonds that if worked too much tighten too quickly and can tear away from each other. By giving the dough a little rest here and there, you allow the gluten to relax and conform to their new bonds. You'll notice the difference even after ten or twenty minutes. You'll give it a shape, it starts to feel tight, let it sit on the bench for a bit, come back and it's loosey-goosey. You're dealing with a living thing, it needs time to adjust just like all of us.

The final shape is basically what it sounds like. Typically through a series of strategic folds and pinches, you cinch the dough up into the shape it will be before it hits the oven. You're also typically shaping it to fit into a proofing basket, which we'll cover in the next chapter, class.

PROOF

'Proofing' or 'proving' as a term in bread making came about in the early 19th century, wherein brewers would mix a small quantity of their beer with a small quantity of flour with the intention to prove their beer was fermented. I believe the idea was - since beer at the time was unfiltered and still had a lot of yeasts floating around in it - that within a short period of time the mixture would begin to rise, proving that they weren't trying to scam anyone...

Well, either way, what it means to us now is the final stage of fermentation, and this can look like one of two broad categories: ambient or cold proofing. Ambient proof is simply letting your loaf sitting in the proofing basket on the counter for anywhere from 1-4 hours, whereas cold proofing is - you guessed it - in the fridge for anywhere from 4-24 hours! We at SOURJOE are big proponents of cold proofing because it allows for a ton of flavour and structure development without the danger of your bread "over-proofing". This happens when the yeasts hit their peak of available food and begin to go dormant or die, and the gluten gets snipped by protease for too long that it completely looses structure, turning back into a goopy puddle of slop (speaking from experience). The cold slowwwws the yeasts and enzymes down but the bacteria continue to do their thang.

You can determine where you are in the proofing process with the poke test. Simply poke the loaf and look at the indent. If it springs back, it's under-proofed and needs more time. If you were to bake it at this stage you risk tearing the crust and having an equally dense and too-open crumb. If the indent doesn't move at all, it's over-proofed. Baking at this stage tends to make it more wide than tall, an unpleasantly stiff and shiny crust, and the crumb will be dense, sour, and gummy. If the indent springs back slowly and only half way, you've hit the goldilocks zone! It's the perfect time for baking!

BAKE

I don't want to sound glib, but I'm not going to explain what this stage is. However I will cover some of the different ways this stage happens and a little bit of what's happening to the dough itself.

Right before it goes in the oven, the dough is filled with thousands of tiny little gas bubbles, held inside with a complex web of water and gluten. When it goes in the oven, the rapid temperature change makes the gas bubbles expand, but instead of escaping up into the air the tensile strength of the gluten holds them in and the entirety of the dough itself begins to stretch outwards, or grow. Moisture is evaporating like crazy and once the internal dough rises above a certain temperature all the microbes are killed and the enzymes are denatured, leaving behind a big crusty balloon.

Bakers of old would make dozens and dozens of loaves at a time in large shallow ovens. Most breads would be hard, dense, crusty, and hearty. It was hard to achieve a light fluffy loaf - even with more refined flours - without adding a ton of more expensive ingredients like milk, eggs, fats, etc. This was due to the fact that the crust would dry out quicker than the interior could fully expand. Eventually the steam injected oven was invented, which dramatically improved the outcome of the loaves by keeping the exterior environment in the oven fully hydrated so the crust couldn't harden over.

The best way a home baker can achieve this is with a heavy oven-safe pot, and the two most common methods are hot baking and cold baking. Hot baking is when the pot is heated in the oven until its screaming hot, then the dough goes in quickly, lid on, into the oven for the appropriate amount of time. Cold baking is when the dough goes into a room temperature pot, covered, put into a cold oven, and then the oven is turned up to the right temperature. Usually for cold baking you don't start the timer until the oven reaches temp. For both of these methods, about half way through the baking process the lid is removed from the pot, revealing the pale soft orb to the open oven. This ensures that enough moisture is released and the crust browns sufficiently.

Scoring is also most commonly done in both methods. Scoring is just a fancy word for slicing. The best tool for that is a razor blade fixed in a lame (pronounced lahm), but a really sharp knife or serrated bread knife works, too. Either way, the baker slices almost parallel with the ground against the top skin of the loaf, about half an inch deep, to achieve that signature big dramatic ear (the pointy lip of the finished loaf).

Everything I've just described pertains to average loaves of bread, the boules and batards and the like. Bagels, pizza, focaccia, etc are all baked differently, but the general idea for all baking is outlined in the first half.

Basically, put it in a hot oven until its done.

POST-BAKE

Did you really think baking was the final stage? This is SOURJOE, we're always throwing something at you to keep you on your toes!

We really wanted to hammer home the importance of what you do once your bread comes out of the oven, because this is when a lot of bakers mess up. You've been so patient, so careful, and now you can finally reap what you have sown. You cut into your steaming hot bread and it's a little gummy! What went wrong?

The bread keeps cooking and off-steaming until it's completely cool. This stage is still a cooking stage. The time you rest your bread depends on its size and flour profile. For an average white loaf, you should really be waiting up to 2 hours, but you can get away with waiting an hour and cutting into it while it's still ever so slightly warm. That's the best eating experience anyway.

When bread is cooling for the first few minutes, you'll hear snapping and crackling and popping like rice crispies. This is called the "bread song", it's singing out that it's done baking and finally relaxing, slightly contracting into itself as the pressure eases from the interior. Kind of like how your stomach feels after a huge burp and the maitre d' kindly asks you to leave and never come back (hot tip, "compliments to the chef" doesn't fly).

This stage is also very important for other types of breads. Dinner rolls or hamburger buns, for example, typically get a brushing of butter or oil after they come out of the oven. Pizza often has ingredients added on top after it's baked. Pullman and other sandwich loaves typically need to rest on their side for a portion of the cooldown. Pannetone needs to be hung upsidedown!

Regardless of the recipe, this final stage is very important to ensure the best quality of your finished product. It might also be the most patience-testing chapter of your life.

Final Thoughts

There are so many kinds of bread, so many different preparations, and so many ways to go from loose ingredients to a final product that it's hard to imagine it can be broken down into anything bigger than individual steps. But this isn't based off of any one bread baking practice or culture, it's based off the most important factors: yeast and flour. The construction of these chapters is to help you (and us) understand at which stage of life the yeasts (and bacteria) are at and the structure of the flours after being hydrated over time. All the different techniques and tricks in the steps are to take advantage of which stage the yeasts and flours are at. Kneading a lot early on strengthens the dough quicker. Letting the dough proof at room temperature allows you to bake sooner. Waiting to add salt gives the microbes a head start. Adding more water helps both the microbes and gluten development.

We're not the first people to address this or even put something like this into practice. This is just the way that we feel encompasses the world of sourdough baking we've encountered over our combined two decades of experience learning and baking at home, and we really hope it helps you build a scaffolding around your baking days and potentially help you in one day constructing your own recipes. We can't wait to see what you make!

Do you think this process makes sense? Would you use it? Change something? Let us know below!

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