Flour Water Salt Yeast

This dough rises overnight, and the extended bulk fermentation gives it more time to develop complexity in its flavors than the two Saturday Breads (see The Saturday White Bread and The Saturday 775% Whole Wheat Bread). The baked loaves should

most important ingredient for making good bread is plenty of time

were sort of prepared, and sort of not prepared. Baked goods aren’t like restaurant fare; we can’t make them on demand. We start almost everything at least the day before, so we have to guess: How many baguettes are we going to sell tomorrow? How many éclairs, croissants, and tarts?

“Slicing into a loaf, you feel the crust crackle, but it’s not tough or too chewy. The crumb is soft, moist and riddled with the holes created by expanding fermentation gases. It has that yeasty, nutlike wheat taste typical of good rustic bread, but there’s another, deeper level of complex flavor that’s hard to pin down. It makes you want to keep eating.”