You can make a loaf of bread in four hours. Commercial yeast, a warm proof box, straight into a hot oven. It will rise, it will brown, and it will be bread.
It will also taste of almost nothing.
What the time is actually doing
Fermentation is not a delay before the bake — it is the bake, happening slowly and at room temperature. Over eighteen hours in the cold, the wild yeast and lactobacilli in the starter break long starch chains into sugars, throw off acetic and lactic acid, and rearrange the gluten into something extensible enough to hold an open crumb.
That acidity is flavour. It is also shelf life, and it is also why people who find commercial bread hard to digest often find this loaf easy.
The schedule, honestly
- Day one, evening. Feed the starter. It doubles overnight.
- Day two, morning. Autolyse. Mix. Four folds, forty minutes apart.
- Day two, evening. Shape, into the banneton, into the cold.
- Day three, dawn. Score. Dutch oven at 250°C, lid on for twenty, lid off for twenty-five.
Three days for a loaf you will finish in two. That ratio has never once felt wrong.
Filed under
- sourdough
- fermentation
- bread
