Look at how far we've come. We've learned to watch the dough, not the clock. We've worked on shaping and scoring. We've handled wet dough and figured out how to manage it without panicking. We've built our first preferments and seen what a poolish can do. Now we're going to take everything you've learned and build on it. This week we're baking the pretzel loaf. Two tracks. Same loaf. Yeasted with a poolish if you don't have an active starter, or sourdough if you do. Same hydration, same flour weight, same bath, same bake. Just two different ways to get the dough started. Here's what we're adding to your toolkit this week. The alkaline bath. Most home bakers have never used one. It's the step that turns a regular loaf into a pretzel loaf. Three things happen in that bath, and once you understand the why, you'll never look at a pretzel the same way again. Scoring an alkalized crust. The bath seals the surface tight, which means your score has to do real work. We'll get into where to place it and how deep to go. Reading the bake. The five-minute butter rule. What success looks like when you cut into the crumb. The three most common mistakes and how to fix them before they happen. Here's the thing about doing this together that you can't replicate baking alone in your kitchen. When you bake on your own, you only see your loaf. You don't know if your bulk fermentation went too long or too short until you've cut into it. You don't know what underproofed looks like at hour four versus hour six. You don't know if your bath was strong enough until the loaf comes out pale and you're not sure why. In a bake-along, you're seeing dozens of doughs at every stage at the same time. Someone's hours ahead of you. Someone's hours behind. Someone's about to make the same mistake you almost made yesterday, and you can warn them. Someone else figured something out you didn't, and now you know it too. You get exposed to bread you might never have tried on your own. The pretzel loaf is a perfect example. How many of you would've boiled a bread dough in alkaline water if you weren't doing it as a community? Probably not many. But you'll do it this Saturday, and your kitchen's going to smell like something it's never smelled before.

So I tried to make a sourdough loaf using Henry's white bread recipe. It doesn't have an ear, and I'm noy sure what I've done wrong. My guess is I didn't bulk ferment long enough, even though I let it rise for 9 hours. It was cold in my kitchen, temp around 69 F. What do you think?