Week 6 Bake: Your starter's first loaf

A week-old starter, a levain built overnight, and a bulk ferment you end by looking at the dough rather than at the clock

29 March 2027

The jar you started in week 5 has to raise a loaf on Monday. No packet yeast on the bench this week, and nothing in the dough that has not come out of that jar.

Before the session#

Test the starter rather than trusting it. Keep the feed you have been giving it — 25 g of starter, 25 g of flour, 25 g of water — but give it somewhere near 24 °C, mark the jar at the dough line with a rubber band, and time the double. Four to six hours is a culture you can bake with. Do it on two consecutive days, because one good rise can be luck and two is something you can plan a bake around. Keep it at 24 °C from here on: vigorous, and sitting between the two flavour poles rather than at either one.

A seven-day-old jar taking eight hours or more is usually cold or hungry rather than broken. At 19 °C it works at roughly half the rate it does at 24 °C, so one feed a day leaves it hours past peak, sitting in its own acid, every day. Put it somewhere warmer — an oven with the light on, an esky with a jar of hot water in it — and feed it twice a day until Monday. Feed it when it has domed and is about to sink, not when the clock says so.

Then build the levain, 8 to 12 hours before the session: 40 g starter, 120 g bread flour, 120 g water at 24 °C. That makes 280 g and you need 240 g, so the margin covers what stays in the bowl. Bring it domed and loose, smelling sweetly sour — not sunken and sharp, which means you built it too early and it has already been and gone.

In the session#

Five hours, and only the first twenty minutes of it are on a schedule.

0:00 — a loaf goes in. There is a dough on the bench, shaped and retarded yesterday. Straight from the fridge into a cast-iron pot preheated to 250 °C, lid on for 20 minutes, then lid off at 230 °C for 20 to 25 more. Watch it now, because tomorrow morning you do it alone in your own kitchen.

0:10 — mix. 780 g bread flour, 100 g wholemeal, 630 g water, 20 g salt, and 240 g of your levain. Count the levain’s flour and water in and the formula is 1000 g of flour at 75% hydration and 2% salt, with 12% of the flour prefermented, which is how bake-off 2 wants it written. Hold back 50 g of the water, mix the rest to a shaggy mass, rest it 30 minutes, then work in the salt and the water you held back. Aim for 26 °C in the dough when you stop.

0:45 — bulk ferment. Fold the dough in the tub at 30, 60, 90 and 120 minutes, then leave it alone. Use a straight-sided tub so you can see the dough against the wall, and mark where it starts.

How long this takes depends on how warm the dough is. These are numbers to plan your afternoon around, not signals to stop.

What ends bulk is the dough. You want a 30 to 50% rise off the mark — not double, which is a packet-yeast habit and overshoots here — a surface gone domed and smooth, a wobble like set custard when you shake the tub, and bubbles where the dough meets the side of the tub.

A dough that came off the mix at 23 °C will still be in the tub when the bench is being wiped down. Take it with you and finish it at home — the week teaches you to wait for the dough, and the first time you have to is today.

Divide, pre-shape, rest 20 minutes, shape. There are 1770 g in the tub: two pieces of about 885 g, which is what the pot takes. Shape tight, seam up into floured bannetons, then into the fridge at 4 °C. Cold dough is firm dough, and firm dough takes a blade cleanly.

Afterwards#

Bake in the morning, straight out of the fridge, with no warm proof first — the night at 4 °C was the proof. Score it cold, the moment before it goes in. One pot and two loaves means the second waits in the fridge while the first bakes, and the pot goes back to 250 °C for twenty minutes in between, or the second base never sets.

Cut one after two hours and read what you did. A dense crumb with one long cavern under the top crust, and a ragged tear down the side away from your score, is a dough that came out of the tub with gas still to make and made it in the oven, at your shaping’s weakest point. A loaf that slumped on the bench, stuck in the cloth and dragged under the blade went the other way: hours too long in the tub, and the gluten was cut up faster than the gas could fill it.

Log the four numbers that let you change one thing next week: the doubling time and temperature at your last starter feed, dough temperature after mixing, the rise percentage and the hour you called the end of bulk, and the length of the retard. Weeks 5 to 8 are marked together, and a loaf without its log is a loaf you cannot repeat.