Week 1 Bake: The straight dough

Flour, water, salt and yeast mixed by hand and baked in a tin — the bench session the other eleven weeks are measured against

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Bakers’ percentages first, because every formula you meet between now and week 12 is written in them. Flour is 100 %. Water, salt and yeast are each given as a fraction of the flour weight, so one formula scales from a single loaf to forty without being rewritten. This week: 1000 g flour, 650 g water, 20 g salt, 7 g instant dried yeast, which is 100 %, 65 %, 2 % and 0.7 %. That comes to 1677 g of dough and makes two tin loaves. Do the arithmetic at home. The bench is a bad place to learn it.

Buy bakers’ flour, 11.5–13 % protein. Plain flour sits nearer 9 %, and the shortfall comes almost entirely out of the gluten-forming fraction, so the loaf comes out squat.

In the session#

Three and a half hours, and the dough sets the order.

Mix, twenty minutes. Glutenin and gliadin sit inert in dry flour. Water hydrates them; working the dough links them into a continuous network, glutenin supplying elasticity and strength, gliadin the extensibility that lets the network stretch instead of snapping. That network is gluten. Aim for 24 °C in the dough when you stop — in a 20 °C room, water at about 30 °C gets you there. Test with a windowpane: pull a walnut of dough thin enough to see light through it. Under-mixed dough tears first, in short ragged holes, and the fix is simply to keep going.

Salt goes in at 2 %. It shields the charges on the gluten proteins so they pack more closely, which is why a salted dough feels tighter within a minute, and it slows the yeast by drawing water away from it. A loaf mixed without salt ferments faster than you can shape it and tastes of almost nothing.

Bulk ferment, ninety minutes at 24 °C. The yeast converts sugars to carbon dioxide and ethanol, and the gluten network traps the gas. Instant dried yeast is one selected strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, dried to a fine granule and uniform batch to batch, which is exactly why we start with it: it does the same thing every week. Week 6 hands that predictability back in exchange for a starter.

Shape and proof, fifty minutes. Knock the dough back, divide it into two pieces of about 840 g, shape each one tight and set it seam-down in a greased 900 g tin. A tin loaf is ready when the crown sits about 2 cm above the rim and a floured fingertip leaves a dent that fills slowly. Score one cut down the length, 1 cm deep, just before it goes in, so the loaf opens where you chose rather than along a side seam. Proof past the fingertip test and the gas cells inflate beyond what the gluten can hold: the loaf sighs flat the moment the blade touches it and bakes out coarse.

Bake, thirty-five minutes at 230 °C. For the first ten minutes the trapped gas expands, water flashes to steam and the yeast makes a final burst before dying off between 50 and 60 °C. That is oven spring. It ends as the starch gelatinises from around 60 °C and the gluten sets, and nothing you do after that changes the volume. Crust colour is Maillard browning and caramelisation, and both want real heat. An oven that has not finished preheating browns the loaf so slowly that the crumb is cooked before the crust has any colour, and you pull out a pale loaf with a thick, leathery skin. Turn it out and knock the base. A set crumb with rigid walls sounds hollow; a dull thud means it is still wet inside and wants five more minutes out of the tin.

Afterwards#

Cool it on a rack for an hour before you cut. A hot loaf cuts gummy because the starch is still setting and the moisture has not finished moving outwards.

Record four numbers every week: dough temperature at the end of mixing, bulk time, proof time, bake time. Photograph the crumb next to something of known size. By bake-off 1 in week 4 that log is your only evidence of what you actually changed.