The Art of Traditional Bread Making: A Journey of Self-Discovery and Innovation

For me, bread making has been a journey of self-discovery and innovation that spans over 25 years. I remember being fascinated by the idea of baking bread as a way to travel the world and find work that would allow me to feed people. Little did I know that this passion would lead me down a path of discovery that would change my life forever. As I began to explore the world of traditional bread making, I was struck by the simplicity and elegance of the process.

The art of making traditional bread is not just about following a recipe, but about understanding the intricacies of yeast fermentation, temperature control, and dough development. It's a journey that requires patience, persistence, and creativity. As I delved deeper into the world of bread making, I began to appreciate the importance of using high-quality ingredients, such as unbleached flour, fresh yeast, and pure water. The type of flour used can make or break a loaf of bread, and it's essential to choose a high-protein flour that will provide structure and texture.

One of the most critical steps in making traditional bread is proofing the dough. This involves allowing the dough to rest and rise, which allows the yeast to ferment and produce carbon dioxide gas bubbles that give bread its light and airy texture. The length of time required for proofing can vary depending on the type of bread being made, but it's essential to allow the dough to rest long enough to develop a complex flavor profile. I like to think of proofing as a meditation, where the dough becomes more relaxed and receptive to the forces that will shape its final form.

As the dough proves, it begins to take on a life of its own, developing a sense of character and personality that's unique to each loaf. The longer the dough proofs, the more complex and nuanced the flavor becomes. This is where the magic happens, and the bread starts to develop its signature flavors and aromas. For me, this is the most exciting part of the process – watching the dough transform into a beautiful, golden-brown loaf that's full of life and energy.

Now, let's talk about scoring – or rather, not scoring. Ah, scoring! It's a topic of much debate among bakers, with some advocating for deep cuts and others for more delicate, lacy patterns. For me, scoring is all about creating a visual narrative that tells the story of the bread's journey. I like to think of it as a kind of poetic expression – each score is a brushstroke on the canvas of the loaf, adding texture and depth to its overall appearance.

When it comes to baking traditional bread, there are few things more satisfying than watching a perfectly proofed dough emerge from the oven, golden brown and fragrant with the scent of yeast and flour. But what really sets this process apart is the science behind it – the Maillard reaction, the steamy environment, the carefully calibrated temperature and time.

As I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite tools for baking traditional bread is a Dutch oven. There's something about the way the steam builds up inside that creates a perfectly sealed chamber, allowing the dough to expand without over-browning or developing an unappealing crust. It's almost like alchemy – taking simple ingredients and transforming them into something truly magical.

Of course, no discussion of traditional bread making would be complete without mentioning the role of grains. As a sprouted rye baker, I have the privilege of working with some of the most nutritious and delicious grains on the planet. Sprouting grains allows us to tap into their natural energy and vitality, unlocking flavors and textures that are simply sublime. It's amazing how something as simple as soaking grains in water can bring out their full potential – a testament to the power of nature and the human touch.

As I reflect on my journey as a bread maker, I realize that it's not just about creating delicious loaves – it's about community, connection, and sharing. Bread making is an act of love, one that requires patience, dedication, and creativity. By sharing our passion with others, we create a sense of belonging and togetherness that transcends borders and cultures.

As I look back on my 25 years of bread making, I realize that this journey has been one of self-discovery and growth. It's taught me the value of patience, persistence, and creativity – skills that have translated far beyond the kitchen. By pushing the boundaries of traditional bread making, we can innovate and evolve while remaining true to our roots.

In conclusion, traditional bread making is an art form that requires skill, patience, and creativity. By understanding the intricacies of yeast fermentation, temperature control, and dough development, we can create truly exceptional loaves that are full of flavor and character. Whether you're a seasoned baker or just starting out on your journey, I encourage you to explore the world of traditional bread making – you never know what wonders await you.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmy name is Chad Robertson I'm the co-founder of Tartine and today I'm going to turn these ingredients into our three essential breads that we make at Tartine bakery first I'll make the leaven which is sourdough and we'll use that in all three breads the three essential breads are a country sourdough a porridge bread and a sprouted rye bread first we'll mix our dough's and then we'll be dividing and shaping the dough baking the dough and then cutting the loaf and we're gonna start with mixing the leaven to make a leaven or a sourdough starter from scratch and you just start with flour and water and you mix it together and you keep it in a relatively warm place and let it start fermenting over three to four or five days and then you take a little seed of that and seed another batch with feeding it fresh flour and fresh water until it starts to act very predictably so we're taking the pre-existing sour to eleven that's one hour to two hours from the last feeding so it's pretty young break the sourdough up in the water first and then add the flour and incorporate by hand I added in that sequence just because it tends to be the least messy when you're working at home with a little Bowl just takes a few minutes to incorporate so you don't have any flour lumps so we're going for something that would be considered close to a liquid leavened it's a little thicker it's easy to stir with your hand it doesn't really form a dough but it's also not soupy so I would say a pretty wet batter without any lumps in it and once it's relatively smooth you can let it rest so I'll transfer the levan into a jar here cover it and keep it in a warm place and we'll use it in the next couple of hours as we mix these dos next we'll mix our dough's and we're going to start with the country sourdough so mixing the country sourdough is essentially the same thing as mixing the leaven its timing and inoculation are different and then it has the addition of salt the country bread is a classic sourdough bread that we're known for and is pretty universally popular it's sort of like a chocolate chip cookie it's there's nothing challenging about it but it's it's a really good bread and it goes with everything sourdough leaven serves a of purposes one of them is adding gas as it's fermenting and gives you volume and lift and a light texture on the inside the other thing is add a very distinctive flavor the longer the rise up to a point the more sort of layers and depth of flavor that you can develop at Tartine we start with a very young sourdough meaning we don't leave too many hours in between the feedings we feed it quite often so it stays at a pretty young stage of growth just to keep the acidity lower because generally we do very long final rises and that acid sort of builds during that long final rise so we want to start with this little acid as possible this part of incorporating the ingredients is there's no real trick here I'm just trying to incorporate everything together as efficiently and cleanly as possible and I just use my hand you could certainly use spatulas and scrapers and things so after we do that initial mix without the salt we let it rest for about 15 to 20 minutes the French have a term for this is called Auto lease and it's just leaving it to rest so that dough can start forming on its own during the rest period a few things are happening it's starting to ferment and the bacteria in the yeast are starting to multiply at the same time the starches are swelling they're absorbing the water and then the gluten strands are starting to align and and develop so we'll come back after 20 minutes and start to incorporate the salt into the dough using a little bit of water to moisten our hands and to kind of help to dissolve that salt in as we cut and fold it in to the dough the salt will temper the fermentation and also tends to give you some strength in the gluten it makes it contract in a way that you want especially when you're making really high hydration dough's so we're gonna cover the dough now and it's starting its bulk rise part of the fermentation which is rising in one big massive dough during that three to four hours we'll give it turns every 20 minutes to half an hour to do those turns we've just folded over itself a few times to continue to develop the strength and the gluten of the dough next we're gonna mix our porridge bread dough which starts with cooking porridge which is essentially making oatmeal or our porridge we use a blend of oats and purple barley flakes and we do season it with a little bit of salt having those fully cooked gelled starches added to the bread dough at the end releases the bound moisture that's been cooked into that grain and gives you an extra moist bread that keeps for longer than a traditional bread without cooked grain so the porridge acts as a very basic sort of natural preservative by just keeping the bread moister for longer the main thing you want is to really have enough water there to gel all the starch as you're cooking it so it's important that it's not super dry and that's fully cooked so once it's finally cooked you're just gonna want to spread it on a sheet pan or Hotel pan so I'm spreading the porridge out thin so it can cool I'm gonna set it aside for 20 minutes half an hour you could also do it a day in advance and just let it cool down and next we'll mix the dough for the porridge bread so the porridge bread is essentially a country bread with some added cooked grain to it the one that we make at Tartine has a lot more whole grain in the basic dough so that's a difference but it's still the technique is really the same and you could certainly make a straight country dough and add porcha to it which we've done many times when I was learning to be a baker in the early 90s there wasn't a lot of diversity in the grains that we could use in bread we generally had in the u.s. white flour and wheat flour to work with and the porridge technique really sort of gave us a much more diverse palette of grains to use in the bread so it was like going from black and white to color over the last six or seven years we've been working with grain breeders and farmers very closely to expand on the diversity of grains that we get to work with and now we approach it in just the same way that we approach sourcing our carrots and our tomatoes and beef and everything else we work directly with the people that are growing and raising these things and it's made baking a much more interesting thing to do I'll let this dough rest about 20 minutes and by that time the porridge will be cool and I can add the salt and give the dough a couple of turns and then start incorporating the porridge so you want to develop the dough a little bit before adding the porridge when you're mixing by hand it's it's sort of every time you give it a turn it's getting more air and more strength and developing more if you have to the porridge in by hand at the very end when you're ready to divide it it's gonna sort of degassed your dough in a way that you don't want so add it earlier in the stage of mixing and then develop it very gently over the course of folding and turning for a few hours so I've cut the salt in the same way for the country dough and then we're gonna have the porridge in again just really trying to make sure that it's all incorporated so that I can let it rest and that dough formation can happen on its own once the porridge is fully incorporated I'm gonna set this aside in a warm place and let it continue to both ferment giving it turns every 20 minutes to continue to develop the structure of the dough now I'll mix the sprouted Rado which we call Rene's riots an homage to a chef named Rene bull vyg who generously shared his recipe with me six or seven years ago when I first started going to Denmark there are more ingredients in this bread than the other two breads of the country in the porridge mixing this you develop a little bit of structure from the minimal amount of flour in the spread but really you're stirring to incorporate and then you're kind of letting it ferment in bulk in a similar way but you're not really developing too much gluten as this thread is really like a batter and it goes into a pan and the pan is what gives it most of its structure the liquids again going in first we have some water some buttermilk dark beer which its traditional a lot of German breads and all the alcohol bakes out but you get a really nice flavor a little bit of dark malt syrup and adds a sort of toasted barley malt flavor which is really nice in this bread again the 11 goes into liquids break it up by hand and a couple of different kinds of flour we're using a little bit of rye and a little bit of spelt there's no really hard rule on that you can use all different kinds of flour for your preference then we have the seeds in sesame flax seeds pumpkin really everything just gets added and you're gonna end up with kind of a wet concrete like batter I mix everything together and then add the sprouted grains at the end again just cutting them in by hand scraping the sides of Bowl until everything is evenly incorporated in the early stage it's gonna be pretty wet it gets a little bit thicker as all the seeds in the soprano grains start absorbing some of those liquids salt in the end we don't really have to do an auto lease because the structures not really solely relying on gluten development so you definitely want to add everything in make sure it's all moist you could certainly give it an auto lease if you want but it's not as critical of a step so now we're in the bulk fermentation for our dough's and we're going to be giving it the folds and turns to develop strength you take the dough's from where they're resting uncover them I dip my hand in water that way the dough doesn't stick to it so much and just reach down underneath the dough and pull it over itself and turn the bowl and people have again different techniques and different sort of rituals of how many times they do it but essentially you're just folding it onto itself and it develops strength it also gives you a chance as you're making the bread to feel how it's developing every time you give it a turn you're affecting the fermentation but you're also sort of checking in on the dough and you have a sense of how fast it's going or how slow it's going or maybe it's not feeling is like it's getting the strength that you want and so you give it an extra turn so you're sort of checking in on the dough and these are our dough's after they've sat for three to four hours a full bulk fermentation now we're getting into dividing and shaping the dough dividing is basically also weighing the dough from a larger mass which is the bulk into the individual pieces which would be the final loaf size and then shaping the goal is always to achieve the final shape that you want after it rises I dip my hand in water again and then there's a little water on the table and just use the bench knife their dough scraper as kind of an extension of your hand which really you sort of need that when you're working with wet dough's because it doesn't stick to the metal as much as it sticks your hand we do a gentle rounding using that bench knife and the other hand sort of tucking the outer edge of the dough under itself while you're rotating it with your other hand in a circular motion we use water on the table for dividing instead of flour for a lot of reasons we don't want to incorporate more raw flour into the dough than we have to also we're just trying to minimize the amount of flour that's in the air because over time bakers can develop allergies and it's just from breathing flour all day so we try to minimize that and it makes a huge difference that was the country dough this is the porridge same exact process basically we try to not de gas it too much it's a pretty gentle rounding pre shape and try to use as few turns as we can to get it into the shape that we want I didn't use a scale as you can see you absolutely could and should if you want to be really precise I was just kind of eyeballing it here and I also cut an extra two on each of them just to give a little more of a demonstration of how we do I appreciate but I'm actually only gonna make two loaves with each of these dough's so there's no flour on the table there's no flour on the top so it's pretty easy to just lay one on top of the other after they relax a little bit and make it into what mode this is the sprouted riots pretty sticky and when I say it has the consistency of wet concrete it also sticks like white concrete so you want to sort of empty that out carefully into the pan and then make sure to clean your bowls or whatever utensils you have that have that dough on it the other two dough's will sort of dry and flake off the ride Oh will stick like glue so you want to just clean that stuff quickly a country and the porridge does get a gentle pre shape and then they get a final shape this bread it's very forgiving so you just dump it into the pan and then smooth over the top with your hand just dipped in some water so that doesn't stick and it's good to go until it's ready to bake so with the country in the porridge you want to give them a bench rest if I try to shape these immediately which you could do they will be a little bit too elastic you want to give them time to relax in an ideal world you're giving it 15 to 20 minutes rest and then they're relaxed enough so you can do the final shape so there's really nothing else to do for the sprouted rye bread except let it rise in a cool chamber overnight so I'm gonna take that away and cover it with something that can breathe a little bit and be ready to bake the next day so in preparation for the final shaping I'm bringing a little flour on at the table see I've floured one piece since I'm combining them didn't flour the other one cuz I didn't want put raw flour on the inside we try to keep the flour just on the outside of the loaf as much as possible our shaping technique you flip it over so the flowers on the underside fold the bottom up fold the two sides over sort of into a cylinder and then start folding the tops and sort of stitching the two sides together and then at the end when you have this sort of stitch long piece you fold it over itself and then you know you're basically just kind of strategically folding this thing into itself and then kind of leaving the seam on the underside and careful to put the bread down to rest on the bench where there's no flour because you really want that underside which is a seam that you've just created you want that to seal itself as it rests on the bench for you know five minutes ten minutes something like that shaping is you know there are thousands of techniques all over the world for getting similar things and different things and thousands of shapes of bread but the goal is always to kind of achieve the final shape that you want after it rises and for me shaping at Tartine it's about leaving that air intact that you've developed over this bulk rise the sort of gentle mixing in the gentle bulk rise we don't do guess the dough but we try to really keep all that air in there it's not not just because it gives you an open chrome but because that's the gas that's come off of fermentation so it's it has an aroma and it affects the final flavor and we really wanna keep that intact so they're all shape but we let them rest a little bit again so that the seam seals on the bottom now that the dough's have sort of relaxed and rested on the bench we're gonna give them their final shape at Tartine we prep all the baskets in advance flowering them with a mixture of rice flour and wheat flour the rice flour just being pure starch so it absorbs a little the moisture and linen actually gets really moist the rice flour helps the bread not to stick when we're dumping it out the next day so as you see I'm picking these up seam is up and then you kind of fold the seam in on itself again and it's one of the reasons you really need it to be sealing on a bench that doesn't have any flour those are the two country loaves and then we roll the porridge in some rolled oats or you can you can roll in whatever you want but we roll in something that reflects what the porridge is made of you could leave these baskets out at room and they'd be ready to bake in four or five six hours I really like a minimum of eight to twelve hours and to do that you need to have a cooler chamber than room temp so we take all these baskets and they go into climate-controlled boxes and it makes it more digestible it develops a lot more flavor or during that final rise and you really want them to be kind of at that point so these dough's have gone through the long slow cool rise overnight finally it's time to bake these breads so we preheat the Dutch oven to 500 degrees add some rice flour on the top of the loaf which is pretty moist and sticky at this point we just don't want it to stick in the pan carefully invert that bread into the Dutch oven and then score it with a knife or a very thin double-edged blade which is what we use carefully again get the lid back on and then place it into the preheated oven the Dutch oven just creates a sealed chamber inside of the larger oven and that creates a steamed saturated environment around the loaf of bread which is what you want it's what you want in the beginning of the baking process of the loaf can expand but it won't caramelize until you take that top off two-thirds of the way through the bake and let the steam escape and now it's gonna start browning and caramelizing and developing those flavors and colors and the crust that you want on a deeply caramelized loaf of bread so once the bread is baked the crust is formed and you're getting the color that you want I like mine dark golden brown you want to tip the loaf out of the Dutch oven onto a wire cooling rack any kind of a rack works as long as there's air circulation and the crust doesn't get soggy porridge is the same baking technique is the country so add some rice flour to the bottom of the loaf so it doesn't stick because you're gonna invert it into the hot Dutch oven carefully this one has the grains on the outside and it's hard to get the plate through it so I used scissors for the same effect it's just a different way to score a few different purposes of scoring it's you know everyone says it's a Baker's signature people score differently but really the loaves gonna rise and sort of blow in the oven as its expanding and it's forming across at the same time so you're basically just determining how that's gonna happen different bread traditions have different ways of doing that and we just do one long cut cuz it's simple and it can come out very elegant if all other factors are working the way we remove the lid two-thirds of the way through just so you can start developing a real crust and getting some of that caramelization coloring by releasing the steam so after 40 to 50 minutes I would say when the loaf has the color of the crust that you want carefully remove the Dutch oven tip the loaf out onto a wire rack to cool so the sprouted rye just goes directly into the oven at Tartine we inject the oven with steam you could spray a little water on top of this if you'd wanted to but if it's moist just put it in the oven it's much denser than the country and porridge and so I would say you want to bake this one longer than you think you need to and if it's getting dark on top or even before it starts getting dark cover it with foil and bake it 10-15 minutes longer just to make sure that it's fully cooked in the center once the sprouted rye is fully baked out tip it out of the pan and place it on a wire rack to cool these are the final loaves cooled and ready to cut country porridge and sprouted right I've been making bread and cooking for over 25 years and I started because I thought that baking bread and cooking would mean that I could travel anywhere in the world and find work and feed people and that I would always have food and it's turned out to be all that and way way more I tasted what I consider really good bread for the first time when I was 21 and I instantly thought you know I need to learn how to do this now I'm sort of really trying to make this kind of food more available to more people and to give the next generation of Baker's something to build on that's meaningful and hopefully leave some ideas out there that people can build on really move the needle youmy name is Chad Robertson I'm the co-founder of Tartine and today I'm going to turn these ingredients into our three essential breads that we make at Tartine bakery first I'll make the leaven which is sourdough and we'll use that in all three breads the three essential breads are a country sourdough a porridge bread and a sprouted rye bread first we'll mix our dough's and then we'll be dividing and shaping the dough baking the dough and then cutting the loaf and we're gonna start with mixing the leaven to make a leaven or a sourdough starter from scratch and you just start with flour and water and you mix it together and you keep it in a relatively warm place and let it start fermenting over three to four or five days and then you take a little seed of that and seed another batch with feeding it fresh flour and fresh water until it starts to act very predictably so we're taking the pre-existing sour to eleven that's one hour to two hours from the last feeding so it's pretty young break the sourdough up in the water first and then add the flour and incorporate by hand I added in that sequence just because it tends to be the least messy when you're working at home with a little Bowl just takes a few minutes to incorporate so you don't have any flour lumps so we're going for something that would be considered close to a liquid leavened it's a little thicker it's easy to stir with your hand it doesn't really form a dough but it's also not soupy so I would say a pretty wet batter without any lumps in it and once it's relatively smooth you can let it rest so I'll transfer the levan into a jar here cover it and keep it in a warm place and we'll use it in the next couple of hours as we mix these dos next we'll mix our dough's and we're going to start with the country sourdough so mixing the country sourdough is essentially the same thing as mixing the leaven its timing and inoculation are different and then it has the addition of salt the country bread is a classic sourdough bread that we're known for and is pretty universally popular it's sort of like a chocolate chip cookie it's there's nothing challenging about it but it's it's a really good bread and it goes with everything sourdough leaven serves a of purposes one of them is adding gas as it's fermenting and gives you volume and lift and a light texture on the inside the other thing is add a very distinctive flavor the longer the rise up to a point the more sort of layers and depth of flavor that you can develop at Tartine we start with a very young sourdough meaning we don't leave too many hours in between the feedings we feed it quite often so it stays at a pretty young stage of growth just to keep the acidity lower because generally we do very long final rises and that acid sort of builds during that long final rise so we want to start with this little acid as possible this part of incorporating the ingredients is there's no real trick here I'm just trying to incorporate everything together as efficiently and cleanly as possible and I just use my hand you could certainly use spatulas and scrapers and things so after we do that initial mix without the salt we let it rest for about 15 to 20 minutes the French have a term for this is called Auto lease and it's just leaving it to rest so that dough can start forming on its own during the rest period a few things are happening it's starting to ferment and the bacteria in the yeast are starting to multiply at the same time the starches are swelling they're absorbing the water and then the gluten strands are starting to align and and develop so we'll come back after 20 minutes and start to incorporate the salt into the dough using a little bit of water to moisten our hands and to kind of help to dissolve that salt in as we cut and fold it in to the dough the salt will temper the fermentation and also tends to give you some strength in the gluten it makes it contract in a way that you want especially when you're making really high hydration dough's so we're gonna cover the dough now and it's starting its bulk rise part of the fermentation which is rising in one big massive dough during that three to four hours we'll give it turns every 20 minutes to half an hour to do those turns we've just folded over itself a few times to continue to develop the strength and the gluten of the dough next we're gonna mix our porridge bread dough which starts with cooking porridge which is essentially making oatmeal or our porridge we use a blend of oats and purple barley flakes and we do season it with a little bit of salt having those fully cooked gelled starches added to the bread dough at the end releases the bound moisture that's been cooked into that grain and gives you an extra moist bread that keeps for longer than a traditional bread without cooked grain so the porridge acts as a very basic sort of natural preservative by just keeping the bread moister for longer the main thing you want is to really have enough water there to gel all the starch as you're cooking it so it's important that it's not super dry and that's fully cooked so once it's finally cooked you're just gonna want to spread it on a sheet pan or Hotel pan so I'm spreading the porridge out thin so it can cool I'm gonna set it aside for 20 minutes half an hour you could also do it a day in advance and just let it cool down and next we'll mix the dough for the porridge bread so the porridge bread is essentially a country bread with some added cooked grain to it the one that we make at Tartine has a lot more whole grain in the basic dough so that's a difference but it's still the technique is really the same and you could certainly make a straight country dough and add porcha to it which we've done many times when I was learning to be a baker in the early 90s there wasn't a lot of diversity in the grains that we could use in bread we generally had in the u.s. white flour and wheat flour to work with and the porridge technique really sort of gave us a much more diverse palette of grains to use in the bread so it was like going from black and white to color over the last six or seven years we've been working with grain breeders and farmers very closely to expand on the diversity of grains that we get to work with and now we approach it in just the same way that we approach sourcing our carrots and our tomatoes and beef and everything else we work directly with the people that are growing and raising these things and it's made baking a much more interesting thing to do I'll let this dough rest about 20 minutes and by that time the porridge will be cool and I can add the salt and give the dough a couple of turns and then start incorporating the porridge so you want to develop the dough a little bit before adding the porridge when you're mixing by hand it's it's sort of every time you give it a turn it's getting more air and more strength and developing more if you have to the porridge in by hand at the very end when you're ready to divide it it's gonna sort of degassed your dough in a way that you don't want so add it earlier in the stage of mixing and then develop it very gently over the course of folding and turning for a few hours so I've cut the salt in the same way for the country dough and then we're gonna have the porridge in again just really trying to make sure that it's all incorporated so that I can let it rest and that dough formation can happen on its own once the porridge is fully incorporated I'm gonna set this aside in a warm place and let it continue to both ferment giving it turns every 20 minutes to continue to develop the structure of the dough now I'll mix the sprouted Rado which we call Rene's riots an homage to a chef named Rene bull vyg who generously shared his recipe with me six or seven years ago when I first started going to Denmark there are more ingredients in this bread than the other two breads of the country in the porridge mixing this you develop a little bit of structure from the minimal amount of flour in the spread but really you're stirring to incorporate and then you're kind of letting it ferment in bulk in a similar way but you're not really developing too much gluten as this thread is really like a batter and it goes into a pan and the pan is what gives it most of its structure the liquids again going in first we have some water some buttermilk dark beer which its traditional a lot of German breads and all the alcohol bakes out but you get a really nice flavor a little bit of dark malt syrup and adds a sort of toasted barley malt flavor which is really nice in this bread again the 11 goes into liquids break it up by hand and a couple of different kinds of flour we're using a little bit of rye and a little bit of spelt there's no really hard rule on that you can use all different kinds of flour for your preference then we have the seeds in sesame flax seeds pumpkin really everything just gets added and you're gonna end up with kind of a wet concrete like batter I mix everything together and then add the sprouted grains at the end again just cutting them in by hand scraping the sides of Bowl until everything is evenly incorporated in the early stage it's gonna be pretty wet it gets a little bit thicker as all the seeds in the soprano grains start absorbing some of those liquids salt in the end we don't really have to do an auto lease because the structures not really solely relying on gluten development so you definitely want to add everything in make sure it's all moist you could certainly give it an auto lease if you want but it's not as critical of a step so now we're in the bulk fermentation for our dough's and we're going to be giving it the folds and turns to develop strength you take the dough's from where they're resting uncover them I dip my hand in water that way the dough doesn't stick to it so much and just reach down underneath the dough and pull it over itself and turn the bowl and people have again different techniques and different sort of rituals of how many times they do it but essentially you're just folding it onto itself and it develops strength it also gives you a chance as you're making the bread to feel how it's developing every time you give it a turn you're affecting the fermentation but you're also sort of checking in on the dough and you have a sense of how fast it's going or how slow it's going or maybe it's not feeling is like it's getting the strength that you want and so you give it an extra turn so you're sort of checking in on the dough and these are our dough's after they've sat for three to four hours a full bulk fermentation now we're getting into dividing and shaping the dough dividing is basically also weighing the dough from a larger mass which is the bulk into the individual pieces which would be the final loaf size and then shaping the goal is always to achieve the final shape that you want after it rises I dip my hand in water again and then there's a little water on the table and just use the bench knife their dough scraper as kind of an extension of your hand which really you sort of need that when you're working with wet dough's because it doesn't stick to the metal as much as it sticks your hand we do a gentle rounding using that bench knife and the other hand sort of tucking the outer edge of the dough under itself while you're rotating it with your other hand in a circular motion we use water on the table for dividing instead of flour for a lot of reasons we don't want to incorporate more raw flour into the dough than we have to also we're just trying to minimize the amount of flour that's in the air because over time bakers can develop allergies and it's just from breathing flour all day so we try to minimize that and it makes a huge difference that was the country dough this is the porridge same exact process basically we try to not de gas it too much it's a pretty gentle rounding pre shape and try to use as few turns as we can to get it into the shape that we want I didn't use a scale as you can see you absolutely could and should if you want to be really precise I was just kind of eyeballing it here and I also cut an extra two on each of them just to give a little more of a demonstration of how we do I appreciate but I'm actually only gonna make two loaves with each of these dough's so there's no flour on the table there's no flour on the top so it's pretty easy to just lay one on top of the other after they relax a little bit and make it into what mode this is the sprouted riots pretty sticky and when I say it has the consistency of wet concrete it also sticks like white concrete so you want to sort of empty that out carefully into the pan and then make sure to clean your bowls or whatever utensils you have that have that dough on it the other two dough's will sort of dry and flake off the ride Oh will stick like glue so you want to just clean that stuff quickly a country and the porridge does get a gentle pre shape and then they get a final shape this bread it's very forgiving so you just dump it into the pan and then smooth over the top with your hand just dipped in some water so that doesn't stick and it's good to go until it's ready to bake so with the country in the porridge you want to give them a bench rest if I try to shape these immediately which you could do they will be a little bit too elastic you want to give them time to relax in an ideal world you're giving it 15 to 20 minutes rest and then they're relaxed enough so you can do the final shape so there's really nothing else to do for the sprouted rye bread except let it rise in a cool chamber overnight so I'm gonna take that away and cover it with something that can breathe a little bit and be ready to bake the next day so in preparation for the final shaping I'm bringing a little flour on at the table see I've floured one piece since I'm combining them didn't flour the other one cuz I didn't want put raw flour on the inside we try to keep the flour just on the outside of the loaf as much as possible our shaping technique you flip it over so the flowers on the underside fold the bottom up fold the two sides over sort of into a cylinder and then start folding the tops and sort of stitching the two sides together and then at the end when you have this sort of stitch long piece you fold it over itself and then you know you're basically just kind of strategically folding this thing into itself and then kind of leaving the seam on the underside and careful to put the bread down to rest on the bench where there's no flour because you really want that underside which is a seam that you've just created you want that to seal itself as it rests on the bench for you know five minutes ten minutes something like that shaping is you know there are thousands of techniques all over the world for getting similar things and different things and thousands of shapes of bread but the goal is always to kind of achieve the final shape that you want after it rises and for me shaping at Tartine it's about leaving that air intact that you've developed over this bulk rise the sort of gentle mixing in the gentle bulk rise we don't do guess the dough but we try to really keep all that air in there it's not not just because it gives you an open chrome but because that's the gas that's come off of fermentation so it's it has an aroma and it affects the final flavor and we really wanna keep that intact so they're all shape but we let them rest a little bit again so that the seam seals on the bottom now that the dough's have sort of relaxed and rested on the bench we're gonna give them their final shape at Tartine we prep all the baskets in advance flowering them with a mixture of rice flour and wheat flour the rice flour just being pure starch so it absorbs a little the moisture and linen actually gets really moist the rice flour helps the bread not to stick when we're dumping it out the next day so as you see I'm picking these up seam is up and then you kind of fold the seam in on itself again and it's one of the reasons you really need it to be sealing on a bench that doesn't have any flour those are the two country loaves and then we roll the porridge in some rolled oats or you can you can roll in whatever you want but we roll in something that reflects what the porridge is made of you could leave these baskets out at room and they'd be ready to bake in four or five six hours I really like a minimum of eight to twelve hours and to do that you need to have a cooler chamber than room temp so we take all these baskets and they go into climate-controlled boxes and it makes it more digestible it develops a lot more flavor or during that final rise and you really want them to be kind of at that point so these dough's have gone through the long slow cool rise overnight finally it's time to bake these breads so we preheat the Dutch oven to 500 degrees add some rice flour on the top of the loaf which is pretty moist and sticky at this point we just don't want it to stick in the pan carefully invert that bread into the Dutch oven and then score it with a knife or a very thin double-edged blade which is what we use carefully again get the lid back on and then place it into the preheated oven the Dutch oven just creates a sealed chamber inside of the larger oven and that creates a steamed saturated environment around the loaf of bread which is what you want it's what you want in the beginning of the baking process of the loaf can expand but it won't caramelize until you take that top off two-thirds of the way through the bake and let the steam escape and now it's gonna start browning and caramelizing and developing those flavors and colors and the crust that you want on a deeply caramelized loaf of bread so once the bread is baked the crust is formed and you're getting the color that you want I like mine dark golden brown you want to tip the loaf out of the Dutch oven onto a wire cooling rack any kind of a rack works as long as there's air circulation and the crust doesn't get soggy porridge is the same baking technique is the country so add some rice flour to the bottom of the loaf so it doesn't stick because you're gonna invert it into the hot Dutch oven carefully this one has the grains on the outside and it's hard to get the plate through it so I used scissors for the same effect it's just a different way to score a few different purposes of scoring it's you know everyone says it's a Baker's signature people score differently but really the loaves gonna rise and sort of blow in the oven as its expanding and it's forming across at the same time so you're basically just determining how that's gonna happen different bread traditions have different ways of doing that and we just do one long cut cuz it's simple and it can come out very elegant if all other factors are working the way we remove the lid two-thirds of the way through just so you can start developing a real crust and getting some of that caramelization coloring by releasing the steam so after 40 to 50 minutes I would say when the loaf has the color of the crust that you want carefully remove the Dutch oven tip the loaf out onto a wire rack to cool so the sprouted rye just goes directly into the oven at Tartine we inject the oven with steam you could spray a little water on top of this if you'd wanted to but if it's moist just put it in the oven it's much denser than the country and porridge and so I would say you want to bake this one longer than you think you need to and if it's getting dark on top or even before it starts getting dark cover it with foil and bake it 10-15 minutes longer just to make sure that it's fully cooked in the center once the sprouted rye is fully baked out tip it out of the pan and place it on a wire rack to cool these are the final loaves cooled and ready to cut country porridge and sprouted right I've been making bread and cooking for over 25 years and I started because I thought that baking bread and cooking would mean that I could travel anywhere in the world and find work and feed people and that I would always have food and it's turned out to be all that and way way more I tasted what I consider really good bread for the first time when I was 21 and I instantly thought you know I need to learn how to do this now I'm sort of really trying to make this kind of food more available to more people and to give the next generation of Baker's something to build on that's meaningful and hopefully leave some ideas out there that people can build on really move the needle you\n"