Well, here we are. Bake day. And it landed on the Fourth of July, so let’s make something beautiful today. 🇺🇸 Most of you have your dough or your butter blocks resting in the fridge right now, which means the hard part is behind you. Today’s the payoff. We shape, we proof, we bake. Here’s the game plan: 🥐 Pull your dough, roll it out long, cut your triangles, and shape ⏳ Proof until puffy and jiggly. This is the make-or-break step, so don’t rush it. French folks, you’re looking at a couple hours. Sourdough, yours runs longer, 3 to 5, so be patient with it. 🔥 Egg wash, then bake to a deep mahogany. Pale is underbaked. Let that color build. Now, two things about the heat. 🎇 First, the real one. This heat wave across the country is dangerous, not just uncomfortable. Drink your water, stay cool, and check on the older folks and neighbors around you. Your bread can wait. You come first. Take care of yourselves out there. 🇺🇸 Second, that same heat is sitting in your kitchen. Your final proof has to stay under 78F or the butter melts and weeps out before the croissants ever hit the oven. Find the coolest room in the house. If your kitchen’s running warm, the fridge is still your friend, use it to hold the proof steady. Keep a close eye today, because in this heat they can over-proof faster than you’d think. This thread is home base all day. 🎆 Post your progress right here. Your shaped croissants, your proof, your first tray out of the oven, your crumb shots when you cut in. And if you hit a snag, butter leaking, dough fighting you, proof looking off, drop it in the comments and I’ll walk you through it. I’m around all day. Let’s bake, everybody. 🇺🇸🥐 Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥🇺🇸

We just pulled the last of the English muffins off the rack, so we're switching gears. This weekend the Saturday Bake-Along is pizza, and there's a lane for every one of you. 🙌 𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞'𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐭 𝐛𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧. 🗽 New York Style is our anchor bake. Beginner-friendly, foldable, chewy, and it bakes in a regular home oven. No pizza steel required, no 900-degree wood oven. If you've never made pizza from scratch, this is your loaf. Mix the dough Friday, ball it, let it cold ferment in the fridge, and bake Saturday. You can also go same-day with a 2-hour rise if Friday gets away from you. 👉 https://skoo.ly/ny-style-pizza 🔥 Sourdough Neapolitan is the stretch track for anyone who wants the blistered, leopard-spotted crust and wants to put Vitale to work. Heads up: this one runs about 3 days. Build your levain now, today or tomorrow, so you're ready by Saturday. 20% inoculation, a long cold ferment, the works. This is the one that rewards patience. ⏳ 👉 https://skoo.ly/sd-neapolitan 👧 Kids Can Bake Personal Pan Pizza is for the family table. One 10-inch pizza per kid, they make their own sauce, shape their own crust, pick their own toppings. Same-day, no starter, done in an afternoon. If you've got little ones, pull up a chair and let them run the show. 🧒 👉 https://skoo.ly/kids-personal-pan 🍞 Two loaves, or in this case two pies, is the house standard. Pick your track, post your progress in the thread, and don't wait until Saturday to ask questions. The information is in the dough. 📸 Post your bakes. I want to see the crust, the crumb, the char, the kid-built chaos pizzas, all of it. Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

A lot of bakers use “starter” and “levain” like they mean the same thing. They don’t. Your starter is the culture you maintain. Your levain is the portion you build specifically for the dough you’re making today. That one distinction changes how you think about fermentation. 🫙 Starter = maintained culture🥖 Levain = freshly built preferment for a specific bake Why does it matter? Because building a levain gives you: - better timing - stronger fermentation - more predictable results - better control over flavor and dough strength This is where baking starts shifting from “following recipes” to actually understanding what the dough is doing. Small distinction. Big breakthrough. Perfection is not required. Progress is.

This is the most dangerous part of the bake. It’s also the part that earns this loaf its name. The alkaline bath isn’t a step you wing. If you’ve never done it before, read this twice before Saturday. If you have done it, read it once anyway, because the small mistakes are the ones that bite hardest. ⚠️ Here’s what I want you thinking about. 🥄 When you add the baking soda to the boiling water, go slow and add it from the edge of the pot. Not the middle. Baking soda hitting the center of a pot of boiling water erupts like a volcano. Adding it from the side gives the reaction room to dissipate across the rest of the pot instead of coming back at your hand or your face. A little at a time. Let it settle. A little more. Let it settle. 🫙 Leave enough room in your pot for displacement when the loaf goes in. The water level rises when the dough hits it. If your pot is full, it spills. 🛟 Have a backup plan for when the dough leaves the sling. It happens. The parchment steps. You tip it wrong. The dough is heavier than you thought. When that happens, you don’t have time to think. Have a couple of pancake spatulas on the counter ready to go. You can dip the loaf out, set it on the stove, regroup, get it back on the sling, and into the Dutch oven. Plan for the slip, and the slip never wrecks the bake. 🍞 A note on pot size and loaf size. If your only Dutch oven is small, don’t try to bake a full-size pretzel loaf. Bake smaller loaves, rolls, or little torpedo pretzel shapes instead. The point of this bake is for you to experience the bath, the science of what happens when you boil dough, and the incredible browning and taste of that crust. A smaller loaf in a properly sized pot teaches you everything a big loaf would, without the risk. 🧈 The butter and salt finish has to be set up before the loaf comes out of the oven. Butter melted. Brush in hand. Maldon in a bowl. All of it ready. The second the loaf leaves the Dutch oven, paint the crust. Wait, and the crust seals up and your butter sits on top.

Right after that runaway poolish, I caught my breath, scraped the counter, and pulled the camera back out. Made a short video walking through how to actually read a poolish when it’s ready. The bubbles, the dome, the dip in the middle, the smell, the texture. All the cues your dough is giving you that most new bakers miss. There’s a fun moment in there too. I show what happens when you put a dry finger in versus a wet hand. One sticks like glue, the other comes out clean. Wet hands, every time. That’s the move that saves your sanity when you’re working with sticky dough. Posting it here in a few minutes. Watch for it. Henry ⭐🔥