Four years of bread, badly measured

I have made something like two hundred loaves and I still cannot tell you the hydration of my standard dough. I could work it out. I have never bothered, and at this point not bothering has become a small point of principle.

The measuring years

For the first eighteen months I weighed everything. Flour to the gram, water to the gram, salt to the tenth of a gram on a jeweller's scale I bought specifically and have since given away. I kept a spreadsheet. There was a column for ambient temperature and a column for how long the bulk ferment ran and a column, I am slightly embarrassed to say, for a subjective crumb score out of ten.

The loaves were fine. Consistently fine. They were also, without exception, worse than the loaves I make now with a bowl, a guess, and my hands.

What the numbers were actually for

It took me a long time to work out that the spreadsheet wasn't teaching me to bake. It was teaching me to defer. Every time a loaf came out badly I had somewhere to put the blame that wasn't me — the flour was different, the kitchen was cold, the starter was sluggish — and every time one came out well I had a row of numbers to credit instead of anything I'd learned.

What actually improved things was the opposite move. I stopped recording and started paying attention. Not to measurements, to the dough: whether it pulled back when I pushed it, whether it felt slack or tight against the side of the bowl, how it smelled at hour four versus hour six.

The thing nobody tells you

A recipe is a description of what happened once, in someone else's kitchen, with their flour and their water and their hands. It is not an instruction. Treating it as one is why my early loaves were identical and mediocre: I was reproducing a description rather than making bread.

Four years in

I now do roughly this. Flour into the bowl until it looks like enough. Water until it comes together wetter than seems wise. Salt, a pinch that I have thrown maybe six hundred times and could not describe. Fold it a few times over the first couple of hours, whenever I walk past. Leave it until it has clearly done something. Shape it, chill it overnight, bake it hot.

That description is useless to you, which is the point. It took two hundred loaves to compress and it will not decompress into your kitchen.

The recipe was never the variable. I was.

The loaves are better than they were. More to the point, making them is no longer an experiment I'm running on myself. It's just something I do on a Sunday, badly measured, and it works.