From One Starter to Three: Rethinking How I Ferment When I started baking sourdough, the lesson was simple: flour, water, time — grow a ferment. I kept one starter, fed it big, and used it to inoculate everything. I also made way too much of it — this was before...
Two Roads to Pane Nero, Part Two: The Math Finally Catches Up Back in June I wrote about Two Roads to Pane Nero — two loaves built from the same idea (adapt Gustiamo’s Pane Nero formula to European flour) but forced down completely different paths: a Swiss...
Back at School: Chasing the Perfect Campagne Baguette There’s a particular kind of baguette I’ve been chasing for years. Namely it’s a campagne baguette: rustic, dark-crusted, open-crumbed, with a flavor that’s earthy and fragrant. So when my...
The Extreme Loaf, Revisited Crumb of Extreme It’s August again, and I keep circling back to the summer I ended up elbow-deep in dough inside a shipping container in San Sebastián. Here’s the story. It starts with Dan Lepard. I’d known Dan from his...
Dough Decides Its Time Every so often a job turns into something more than a job. Last week I made pizzas for a client’s poetry gathering — the kind of night where people actually read their work out loud, no pretense, just words and wine and good company. When...
