Everything that could go wrong, did. · Crust & Crumb Academy

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Everything that could go wrong, did.

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.

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