I tell them, “we carry on a tradition that is 16,000 years old. We turn flour, water, salt and yeast, things that on their own could not sustain life, into the very staff of life.” That’s what we do.

I just pulled this out of the oven and I’m standing here staring at it. That crust looks like rock candy. Salt crystals everywhere. It crackles when you press on it. The inside is still soft and pillowy and the whole kitchen smells like rosemary and olive oil. This is what the brine does. This right here. Saturday we’re making this together. Same recipe. I’ll walk you through every step. 📖 https://pantry.bakinggreatbread.com/recipes/ligurian-style-focaccia​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

We just hit 300 in the Academy. On Valentine’s Day, no less. I’m in the middle of the bake-along right now so I’ll have more to say about this later, but I wanted to take a second to acknowledge it. This community is something special. More coming. Back to baking.

I started my first yeast water loaf yesterday and realized I only had 175ml of yeast water in those little Bonne Maman jars. So I had to scale the recipe down on the fly, recalculating flour and salt. For the autolyse, I mixed the flour and yeast water together, put it in my proofer to rest for 30 minutes… and forgot about it. Two hours later, I finally went in to add the salt. Then I realized I’d miscalculated. Instead of 75% hydration, I was working with 80%. Wet dough. Very wet. Did I mention I also forgot how much flour I’d actually used? So I had to reverse-engineer the salt amount based on my best guess. Mixed in the salt, set a timer for coil folds every 30 minutes… and forgot again. Two more hours passed before I remembered. It took four sets of coil folds to bring that wet dough around into something that resembled structure. Then I bulk fermented it overnight in the refrigerator and baked it off this morning. And here we are. It smells good. It feels good. The crust is singing. This is the lesson: bread is forgiving. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to keep going. Crumb shot coming once it cools. This is yeast water loaf #1. Data, not performance.

Open, irregular holes throughout. No dense spots, no gummy streaks. Proper fermentation despite the 80% hydration mishap and all the timing chaos. This is what yeast water can do. First loaf, scaled-down recipe, reverse-engineered on the fly. The method works. Your dough is more forgiving than you think. If you haven’t started your culture yet, the full course is free in the classroom. Go to Classroom → Yeast Water Method and start with Module 1. Your first loaf is waiting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​