Bake-Off 1: Lean Doughs

Bake one lean bread twice, once to the formula and once with a single variable moved, and account for the difference at the bench

Due: 19 March 2027 · Weight: 20%

The brief#

Pick one of the first four breads, bake it twice with exactly one thing different, and say at the bench why the second loaf is not the first.

The tin loaf, the baguette, the ciabatta and the focaccia are flour, water, salt and yeast. No butter or sugar covers for a poor crumb, and no starter is involved yet — wild fermentation arrives in week 6. What separates a good version from a dull one is hydration, temperature, time and your hands, and this bake-off asks whether you can move one of those on purpose.

So: two bakes of the same bread. The first runs the formula as we ran it at the bench — 65% hydration and 2% salt for the tin loaf, 78% for the ciabatta, the poolish for the baguette, 5% oil in the focaccia dough — at the dough temperature and bulk time you were given. The second is that formula with one variable moved and everything else held. Take hydration up or down five points. Cut bulk by forty minutes, or run it an hour long. Drop the oven from 230 °C to 200 °C. Shape loose instead of tight. Change two things and neither of us can say which one we are tasting.

Before you mix the second dough, write down what you expect: crumb, crust, volume, how the dough will feel at shaping. Be specific enough to be wrong. A variant that failed the way you said it would marks higher than two decent loaves with nothing said about either. Choose the variable you are least sure of, not the one you already understand — the stakes here are low on purpose, and a confident wrong answer this early is worth more to you than a safe one.

Commercial yeast only. A poolish or a biga is fine; it is still the same four ingredients, fermented in two stages.

What you submit#

Two loaves, whole and uncut, on the bench by 12:00 on Friday 19 March, labelled A for the formula and B for the variant. Masking tape on the tray does the job. Bake them within 24 hours of the bench — a focaccia baked on Wednesday is a different bread by Friday. Marisol and Idris cut both in front of the room and you have two minutes to say what you did.

One page of bench notes, on paper, handed over with the loaves. One page, not three. It carries both formulas in bakers’ percentages with the flour weight, the dough temperature at the end of each mix, bulk and proof times with the room temperature you had, oven temperature and bake time, the variable you changed with its value in each bake, the prediction you wrote beforehand, and what actually came out of the oven. Where those last two disagree, say what you think happened.

If a fridge ran warm or an oven would not hold, write it down rather than around it. Notes describing a bake that plainly did not happen cost you more than the bad bake would have. Formulas and timings for all four breads are on the first four Bakes; if you cannot get to an oven that week, ask before the weekend, not on Friday morning.