Kitchen Notebook

Notes on bread, fermentation and getting flour on everything

Posts

  1. Why your sourdough comes out dense

    It is almost never the recipe. Four things account for nearly every close-textured loaf, and only one of them is something you can fix by changing an ingredient.

  2. Hydration is a range, not a number

    Seventy percent on one bag of flour is not seventy percent on another. Treating it as a fixed target causes more trouble than it solves.

  3. What the Dutch oven is actually doing

    It is credited with everything from crust colour to oven spring. It does two jobs, both of them boring and both of them load-bearing.

Older entries have been taken down. What remains is the material that still reads as true after several years of practice.