Dave Shea

Dish Deconstruction – Wild Rice & Market Veggie Salad

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0700

Thanks to Lauren’s birthday falling in early August when the farmer’s markets are bursting with amazing fresh produce, it’s become a bit of an annual tradition for me to tackle a complicated birthday meal and go to town on presentation.

Over the years we’ve eaten at our fair share of fancy restaurants (Michelin-starred or otherwise), so I’ve seen first hand what the highest end of the culinary arts can do. Since I haven’t spent a day of my life working in a kitchen I have no delusions that I’m capable of similar, but I still find it a fun challenge to occasionally produce a meal that aims for those heights.

There’s a compelling mix of left and right brained thinking required to design, schedule, cook, and plate a meal of a sufficiently high caliber — it’s a similar mix to what attracted me to the web many years ago and, unlike the web, the results are instantaneously satisfying if hyper-limited in their reach.

I’ve consumed a ton of food-related media over the years in attempts to elevate my kitchen skills, but I can’t say I’ve ever come across a guide to demystifying the process of putting together dishes like a high end restaurant. Sure, you’ll find no end of individual recipes and plating guides and general cooking techniques. But all of those put together as a piece that walks through the inspiration and intent of a meal from start to finish isn’t something I can remember seeing.

Now I’m not the person to write that. I have no formal training or any credentials, which means this is really just a write up on what I did as an amateur chef from the initial ideas to the challenges I faced and how I improvised to overcome them. But maybe that’s enough? Maybe there are some new ideas in here for people curious about doing similar.

(As an aside, this recent article on staging at a French Michelin-starred restaurant is a peek at the other extreme of the culinary world, and why I have perspective on where my skills are at. If I had a full kitchen crew and experience plating the same dish dozens of times a night, maybe I’d feel differently.)

Concept

This salad was one of four plates for this year’s dinner. I try to approach these meals with a theme in mind. One year it was using techniques and ingredients from Middle Eastern and Chinese traditions and playing them off each other. Another year I borrowed (okay, stole) the concept from a favourite local restaurant that pairs Japanese and Italian tradition in surprisingly and inventive ways.

My guiding theme this year was more abstract: I wanted to pull from French and/or Cajun traditions, but with most of my focus going into the plating. Admittedly this is a fantastic way to plate something pretty that tastes like hot garbage, but I figured with some thoughtfulness toward ingredents and techniques and plenty of flavour checks along the way I could still end up with a pretty good result.

For some inspiration I started an image search to dig up great plating examples. I chose this one as my starting point for a couple of reasons — the vibrant colour looked like an element I could carry across other dishes to unify them, and I needed some lighter fare to contrast some of the heavier dishes that would come later.

(image credit: Getty)

Planning

Since I wasn’t able to find anything about the restaurant that plated that image, my starting points for composition and ingredients were limited to the image itself and my imagination. A few things are fairly evident from looking at it:

The purple purée is almost certainly beet
Identifiable vegetables include candy cane beet, radish, cilantro, and a dark purple leafy vegetable of some kind, possibly radicchio
There’s a browned/crisped item underneath as a base, likely some kind of waffle

I see hints of other items, but that’s all I could be confident about. I’m sure the ingredient list was carefully considered to provide interesting textural and flavour contrast, but to my eyes the layering in this salad feels like the important part.

It also reminded me of a dish we experienced together at Manresa, an ever-changing mix of the freshest garden ingredients they have on the day. If memory serves, that one can hit upwards of 80 component parts at times which made me confident that my approach of layering up great produce that looks and tastes good should work, especially with enough care given to salt, fat, and acid along the way.

So with that inspiration in mind, I had a rough idea for how I wanted to approach this dish:

Candy cane beets look great, so adding an earthy edge to fresh summer produce with those plus a beet purée was a no brainer.
My darker-coloured base would be wild rice instead of greens for some substance.
My crispy element would be crispy slices of new carrots

But I realized everything else would be highly dependent on what I could find fresh at the farmer’s market, so I planned for a fair amount of improvisation during day-of cooking and plating to guide the rest of this dish.

While shopping, I chose a variety of interesting-looking produce: heirloom cherry tomatoes, English peas, a variety of microgreens, edible flowers, fruit, etc. At this point I didn’t know what all I’d use so I was thinking of it more as giving myself enough options to make decisions on the fly — similar to how it’s better to have all the paint colours in advance than it is to need a supply run as the canvas is drying.

This approach sounds like it could lead to a lot of waste, but the following week was spent enjoying other (much quicker) dishes that used up the leftover ingredients.

Preparation & Timing Breakdown

After serving the main course at 10:30pm one year, I’ve gotten way better about planning in advance and spreading my preparation over multiple days so it’s not a mad sprint during the day of. Some items I can make well ahead of time since they won’t degrade noticeably, others I can do the day before or morning of before I get around to making the bulk of the dish.

Crisped greens & veggies retain their crunch fairly well for a couple of days if you store them at room temperature on a wire rack and allow airflow to keep them nice and dry, so I sliced and quickly crisped the carrots in a hot oil bath the day before.

The beet purée needed to be made warm then chilled, so that was something else I could make in advance. I had never actually made a purée before, but I knew it was an element I wanted in the dish. Knowing the result I’m looking for but not having the existing skills or recipe idea to get there happens somewhat regularly during more elaborate meals, but that’s nothing a few searches or YouTube videos can’t fix. I have some preferred recipe and technique sources, but if I can’t find anything on those I tend to just pick the one that sounds best out of the top 3 or 4 results.

I hit the first snag at this point — the beets I bought were too light in colour. I needed the candy canes for topping the salad, but the rest in the bunch were golden or white. I got lucky when I remembered that we had some fermented purple beets in the fridge from a previous experiment, so it was an easy improvisation to throw those in too and boost the colour. I had already salted the purée, so the added salt from the fermented beets amped it up a bit higher than I would have preferred.

Since the wild rice also needed to be chilled after cooking it could also be done in advance. I cooked it in the morning and left it in the fridge for a few hours before assembly. Due to low acidity from the other ingredients the rice was chilled with some cider vinegar to give it a slight, but needed, twang.

Other veggies were all chopped and blanched as needed to prepare my mise en place before assembling the salad. The peas and the beets each got a 10 second blanch to reduce the raw crispness without losing colour, while the sea asparagus needed a bit longer. The blanching water was salted, as was the beet purée, with the intent for these to be the main contributors of salt to the final dish.

One of my favourite improvisation choices during this stage was shelling each pea pod carefully with a knife to keep an intact tendril along the seam, leaving the individual peas connected by a thin thread. This was fiddly and I had to do more than a few to get the effect I wanted without losing peas in the process, but I’m really happy with what it contributed to the end result. I’m certain I must have seen this technique before, but since I have no idea when or where the inspiration was more subconscious here.

Plating

My plan of attack was to spread the purée, mold the rice, and then build up each layer sequentially from there. That would allow me to clean and retry the purée if I flubbed the spread.

But before I could even get to the rice, the spread purée had already started separating liquid from fat along the edges. This may have been avoided if I’d chilled my plates ahead of time, but it caused a hasty cleanup and revised approach. My new plan would be assembling everything first, then applying the purée as one last flourish. The risk here was that having one shot with the purée would lead to poorer results (which it did, more on that in a bit).

To plate the rice I used a round cookie cutter as a mold that I could drop a thin, compact layer into. As I built up the veggie layers in the first dish it became pretty obvious that the rice needed a binding agent because it started falling apart under extra weight. For the second plate I mixed in an egg yolk before assembling which held together much better.

The veggie layers were fairly ad hoc. Working from the bottom up, larger elements were placed below, then smaller items assembled on top in a way that would provide a good amount of colour contrast. The final list of ingredients in this salad:

wild rice
beet purée
candy cane beets
golden beets
crispy carrots
apples
English peas
heirloom cherry tomatoes
radish
sea asparagus
microgreens
flower petals

Finished Result

This is where kitchen experience would have helped. Doing this dish a dozen times would help narrow in on a definitive presentation, and then after plating it a few hundred times more over the course of a few weeks I’d get to a point where I’d be able to do it in my sleep. But hey, I’m only making this dish once in my life, so comparing the result to a commercial kitchen is just the wrong yardstick to measure against.

Plating attempt #1
Plating attempt #2

Plating twice helped me get a result closer to what I was looking for, as I got to fix some of the things I didn’t like about the first. But of course I made new mistakes with the second plating. Some thoughts on what worked and what I’d aim to improve next time:

You can see the rice falling apart in the first plating, compared to how contained it stayed in the second. The quick addition of an egg yolk in between platings was a good call.
Proportions between the beet purée and the rest of the dish are way off. My mistake was trying to use too much purée (I made a lot) and not thinking through the flavour or visual balance enough before running a spoon through the dab to spread it out. I’m happier with the first one, but I still think there’s way too much purée on both plates.
Carrots don’t crisp the way greens and starchier vegetables do in hot oil, so my crunchy element ended up a little soggy.
The sea asparagus is almost invisible, and didn’t contribute much beyond a briny saltiness to the final dish. They didn’t detract, but weren’t necessary.
I’m quite pleased with the colour balance of this dish. Such a spread of vibrant colours was pretty hard to mess up, but I think echoing the pink purée with flowers and beets in the salad really tied it together and allowed the contrasting greens to fit in.
The apple slices feel tacked on. They were necessary for a sweetness in the flavour balance, but it was clear I had too many ingredients in the stack so I fanned them out on the edge on impulse. A balancing element on the other side of the stack might have helped integrate them better.
In the second plating, I accidentally buried one of my star ingredients. The candy cane beets are just barely visible poking out of the bottom.
While I was happy with the pea treatment, how I arranged them on the second plate was much stronger.
I tried to get fancy with the flowers, but the placement ended up being better in my head than on the plate. I get why plating tweezers are a thing in pro kitchens.

Overall I’d say my efforts exceeded my expectations. Mixing fresh market ingredients worked as well as I had hoped, flavour-wise. They all combined into a fresh plate of summer, contrasted by hearty rice and earthy beet. And while I have plenty of thoughts on how I’d improve the presentation, I think what I ended up with actually surpassed my inspiration in many ways.

Vancouver Coffee Essentials

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0800

The border just to our south sometimes makes it easy to overlook our proximity to the Pacific Northwest, but like other major west coast cities Vancouver has some excellent coffee options if you know where to look.

With each offering a different experience, this list was built to give you a tour of the best of our coffee culture. Some require a bit of travel to other interesting neighbourhoods, but luckily most are convenient to the downtown core where most visitors spend their time. There are other really great choices in town not covered here, some of them mentioned in the honourable mentions list at the bottom, but stick to this list if you only have a short amount of time.

(And yep, this list is for those who like coffee coffee without the desserty add-ons. If you’re aching for a double whip frap, I don’t need to tell you where to go for one.)

Revolver Coffee

325 Cambie St (source)

Revolver is a must. Easily one of the top local cafes, it holds its own against a best-of list from almost any other city in the world due to its funky room, excellent service, and obesessive attention to detail. Importing beans from high quality roasters far and wide, don’t be surprised to find Norway’s Tim Wendelboe, Berlin’s The Barn, or London’s Square Mile on the menu alongside top quality beans from all around North America.

The food selection is limited and not why you’re here; stick with the coffee, lovingly poured in a variety of thoughtful and inventive ways, from amazing pourover to cupping flights to packaged cold brew and more. And you can even pick up some new brewing gear from their extensive store in the connected next door Archive.

Elysian Coffee

1100 Burrard St, 1778 W 5th Ave, 590 W Broadway, 2301 Ontario St (source)

A small local roaster that started with a single cafe over 15 years ago and has since spread to multiple locations across town. Great pastries, pourover, and espresso drinks, with beans to go. Most locations don’t have wifi and seating can be scarce during busy hours so don’t expect to park with a laptop, but if you make it to the Broadway & Ash cafe during the summer make sure to check their semi-hidden patio.

Timbertrain Coffee Roasters

311 W Cordova St, 551 McLean Dr (source)

An inventive little roaster with funky communal seating, Timbertrain is only a few years old but already a vital part of the local coffee scene. With pastries, pourover, and espresso-based drinks, they were also the first to introduce nitro coldbrew to the local market and are still the best game in town for it. Their menu is always rotating, and a much larger second space is opening in East Vancouver in 2017.

Matchstick Coffee Roasters

213 E Georgia St, 639 E 15th Ave, 4807 Main St (source)

While it’s accurate to call Matchstick a top notch roastery that partners with coffee producers across the world, the concept behind Matchstick is something much more. The cozy neighbourhood feel of its three locations and an excellent food program revolving around its in-house bakery complements the brews and gives you a reason to come any time of day — especially the Chinatown location, with its well-curated local beer and cider taps.

Moving Coffee / The Taste & See Shop

129-1628 W 1st Ave (source)

This is a bit of an unusual one that isn’t likely to show up on the tourist maps. During the week this tiny back alley shop operates as Taste & See Shop, but on weekends it becomes Moving Coffee operated by a passionate roaster. You can expect fine beans with a story behind them as well as a meticulous approach to crafting each coffee and even unique products like their cold brew Morning Whisky.

Due to the size it’s not a place you can expect to come and park for an extended period, but if you’re visiting Granville Island on a weekend it’s worth the detour for quite possibly the highest quality cup of coffee you’ll find anywhere in the city.

Prado Cafe

100 W Hastings St, 1938 Commercial Dr, 4208 Fraser St (source)

Prado is a cozy mini-chain with good coffee and snacks. Starting life as a single independent cafe on Commercial Dr., it’s now owned by Sammy Piccolo, co-owner of local roaster 49th Parallel. Prado understandably serves exclusively their beans, which are certainly in the top tier of local roasters.

Each cafe has a personality of its own, with the newer locations offering a more refined aesthetic and expanded food menus. They have some great cold options during the summer, including their orange slice adorned espresso tonic that is far better than it has any right to be.

Propaganda

209 E Pender St (source)

A comfy multi-roaster cafe in Chinatown with free wifi and ample power outlets. Offering a variety of single-origin coffees from roasters like Victoria’s Bows & Arrows, Calgary’s Phil & Sebastian, Edmonton’s Transcend and more, it’s a big enough space and just far enough off the beaten path that it makes for a nice quiet place to get in a morning work session. Also literally across the street from Aubade (see next).

Aubade

230 E Pender St (source)

Located in a pocket at the front of an antique shop, calling Aubade a ‘cafe’ would be over-selling it. But don’t let the size or location throw you off, this one man show is perhaps one of the most interesting things happening in the local coffee scene.

Bringing Melbourne’s inventive coffee culture back to Vancouver, owner & operator Eldric recently took third in the Canadian Aeropress Championships and it shows; his technique is unusually scientific, approaching extraction in phases and separating smaller volumes to isolate acids before blending for the final, balanced cup.

You can order espresso-based drinks as well, and you’ll be encouraged to skip the (purposely vegan-only) milk and experience the coffee in its natural state with a slight pricing discount. Don’t expect a wide array of food or seating; there isn’t much of either available. Also literally across the street from Propaganda (see previous).

Honourable Mentions

Also worth your time: 33 Acres Brewing Co. (15 W 8th Ave), 49th Parallel (2902 Main St, 2198 W 4th), Bows & Arrows (4194 Fraser St), Bump & Grind (916 Commercial Dr, 3010 Granville St), Cafe Bica (1809 Fir St), Marche St George (4393 St George St), Musette Cafe (1325 Burrard St), Nelson the Seagull (315 Carrall St), Pallet Coffee Roasters (323 Semlin Dr), Platform 7 (2300 W Broadway, 2331 E Hastings St), Small Victory Bakery (1088 Homer St), The Birds & The Beats (55 Powell St)

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Photo Toning with Gradients & Blend Modes

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0700

Your browser now has ample ability to compose image effects on the fly, saving you a trip into an image editor. You can simulate toning effects and deliver the same image in many different ways by combining layered gradients over top of images and blending with the background-blend-mode property.

A need arose while building the Palate Deck website. After I’d placed the banner photos on various pages, I realized I’d need to go back into Photoshop to tint them and town down the contrast so I could overlay other text and images.

Or… did I?

After consulting caniuse for background-blend-mode support, I realized that a) it’s almost universally supported, and b) if used thoughtfully, it’s an effect that will degrade fairly well when it’s not.

And so I stumbled across a new image compositing trick.

The raw photo
The end result, composed in-browser if your browser supports it (see below)

Basic Setup

This effect is pretty familiar if you’ve ever digitally tinted a photo: take a photo, then add an adjustment layer over top to tint it, or adjust contrast, or add a gradient.

Unlike an image editor, in this case the adjustment layers are browser-generated gradients. And we’re doing this all with background image properties, and the multiple images they support.

But wait, isn’t this what filter is supposed to do? I would have thought so too. However, the latest working draft doesn’t have a mechanism for precise image toning. We’re able to control contrast, and rotate the hue through the spectrum (an ability that’s rarely useful in the real world), but it’s unable to apply specific colour toning and subtle differences to various regions of the image.

So this is where we need to turn to layering and blending. To make this work, start by setting up your image as background-image instead of an img element. You’ll need to set specific dimensions for your container (and media queries to resize where appropriate) and then use background properties to control it all.

.image { max-width: 100%; height: 200px; background-image: url(blog.jpg); background-size: cover; background-position: center; }

(The above properties are omitted from the following code examples for clarity’s sake, but make sure to re-add them for the proper effect.)

To give you an idea of the adjustment control you have, I’ll walk through the steps to create the comparison blend at the beginning of this article.

Tinting

To start, I wanted to tint the image. This is easily accomplished by laying a solid-colour “gradient” over top with the same colour at both start and end points, then using the color blend mode to mix. By adjusting the alpha value of the end points you can control whether the image is fully tinted with the overlaying colour, or whether it allows natural colour to poke through.

.image { /* setup properties omitted */ background-image: linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 0%, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 100% ), url(beer.jpg); background-blend-mode: color, normal ; }

Contrast

The next step was dropping back contrast to let me add text over top. I’m not going to show the text here, but let’s talk about the contrast.

Unlike tinting, we can control brightness and contrast with filter here. But it’s not ideal since it only applies to the final rendered stack, which means it takes all previous effects with it. In this case I’d like the contrast adjustment to occur on the image before the tint and the red gradient is overlaid, so it won’t work for me.

So we’ll have to fake it with more gradients. I’ve chosen to use two; one a white layer set to 50% opacity and the lighten blend mode, the second a 50% opacity black layer set to darken. Combining those two together lightens the shadows and darkens the highlights. It results in a much greyer image, but that doesn’t matter since I’m applying the tint over top.

.image { /* setup properties omitted */ background-image: linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 0%, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 100% ), linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#fff, 0.5) 0%, rgba(#fff, 0.5) 100% ), linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#000, 0.5) 0%, rgba(#000, 0.5) 100% ), url(beer.jpg); background-blend-mode: color, lighten, darken, normal; ; }

Gradients

The basic image is where I need it now, so the last thing to do is add a red gradient at top of the stack to get the final tone I was shooting for. This last layer has some opaqueness and is blended normally to drop the finished contrast further.

.image { /* setup properties omitted */ background-image: linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#d43f2d, 0.9) 0%, rgba(#d43f2d, 0.1) 100% ), linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 0%, rgba(#33767e, 0.9) 100% ), linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#fff, 0.5) 0%, rgba(#fff, 0.5) 100% ), linear-gradient( to bottom, rgba(#000, 0.5) 0%, rgba(#000, 0.5) 100% ), url(beer.jpg); background-blend-mode: normal color, lighten, darken, normal; ; }

Browser Support

The big caveats for this technique are that support for background-blend-mode in IE/Edge is non-existent right now, and Safari doesn’t support the necessary color blend mode yet, so all examples thus far appear broken in those two browsers.

As I said at the beginning, it can degrade well, but you need to plan ahead.

The multiple layers I’m using here are problematic because without blend modes, the rendered result is a muddied mess. It may not always be that bad, but clearly I need to back up a bit with this example.

When blend modes aren't supported
Much better, with a pre-toned photo

The compromise I found for this use was pre-toning and contrast-adjusting the photo in my image editor, and then applying the finishing gradients in the browser. I lose out on some of the benefits listed below by doing it this way, but since I know it’s only a matter of time before Safari and Edge are on board, I’m looking forward to adding the full version to the arsenal in the not so distant future.

You could also consider using @supports to provide a lighter, blend mode free background stack for these browsers, and a second full-featured stack for browsers that do. Support for background-blend-mode and @supports intersects nicely, as IE and Opera Mini will simply ignore the block, while Edge and Safari will choose not to parse it. You’ll need to maintain more code, but @supports does offer a way to avoid pre-toning the image.

Use Cases

So how useful is this, really? Why build up your image toning in-browser instead of simply pre-composing in an image editor?

The answer is flexibility. You may not always be in control of the original image. It might be user-generated or coming in from a CDN. Or you may want to re-purpose it in different sections of your site. Being able to manipulate any source image in the browser is just one more trick for controlling the uncontrollable.

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Everything I Know About Bread

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 00:00:00 -0800

Great bread only needs four ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast.

But there are two more: time and temperature. You need to have some control over these too. Time is the more important of the two to get right, but you don’t want to be too far off on temperature.

Great bread also requires humidity while baking. You can do things like add some water to a drip tray in your oven to create this, but for a standard round boule like the kind I bake frequently, the easiest way to do it is by baking your bread in a cast iron dutch oven with the lid on. No extra water required, the steam escaping creates all the humidity your bread needs to end up with a nice chewy crust. (Just make sure the lid doesn’t have a plastic handle.)

If you can do all that, here’s how to make something like this.

All recipes below adapted from Flour Water Salt Yeast.

Ingredients

I don’t have a lot of advice here other than making sure your yeast is fresh. While my gut says I ought to recommend organic flour, the local brands I’ve tried don’t rise all that well in my experience, so I get better results with the mass-produced stuff.

Basic Yeast-only Bread Recipe

Here’s a good training wheels loaf.

Start by planning ahead. Realize that a good loaf takes the better part of a day to fully come together. You can mix the dough in the morning and walk away for 5-6 hours before the next step, but then you’ll want to be around for the next few hours to see it through.

You can do it as a simple all white flour recipe:

500g white flour
360g warm water (33°C/91°F give or take… warm but not hot tap water will do)
10g salt
2g instant baker’s yeast

Or as a 40% whole wheat recipe:

300g white flour
200g whole wheat flour
400g water
10.5g salt
1.5g instant baker’s yeast (or just use 2g if your scale isn’t fine enough)

When measuring, weight is better than volume because it’s precise. Get yourself a kitchen scale if you don’t have one already. And even if you think in ounces, just use grams on your scale, because something like 1.5g is a ridiculous number in ounces.

Rising the Dough

Instead of mixing everything together at once for the dough, start by combining the flour and water and let it sit for 20 minutes to soften up. Use your hands, or use a Kitchenaid if you have one. Don’t bother kneading, just make sure it’s combined. Cover and let it sit for 20 minutes.

Next, add the yeast and salt and blend them in thoroughly. You don’t really need to knead here either. I work the bread for a couple of minutes with my hands by stretching it almost to breaking, folding it over on itself, then twisting it with both hands a bit. Repeat for a few minutes, and it should be good to rise.

Cover and let it sit in a warm place (24°C/75°F, give or take) for 5 hours. After the first hour or two, get your hands wet and fold it over itself a couple of times. (I don’t actually know why this part is necessary, something about extra oxygen… sometimes I forget to do it and my bread turns out fine.) By the end of the 5 hours it should be about 2-3 times the volume. In the winter you might want to go a bit longer if your room temperature is lower.

Proofing

Now you want to flour a flat surface and a fresh bowl and gently work the bread out of its container. Dust your hand with flour and use it as a blade to separate the dough from the edges, and slowly move it out and on to the floured surface. Gently grab an edge of the dough, stretch it up and fold it over itself. Do this a few times around the edge, try not to squish or flatten the dough as you work. Lightly dust sticky spots with more flour, and then gently roll it along the unfloured part of the surface to form a ball. Put the dough into the floured bowl, and cover.

The folding part is tricky to describe, so you may find this video more helpful.

The next step is proofing the dough, and you have a choice here. You can let it sit to proof for an hour, or you can put it in the fridge and proof for 12-14 hours and bake the next day. An hour allows for a quicker turnaround, but overnight proofing produces tastier results.

In either case, you want to let it proof until you can poke it with your finger, and the hole doesn’t spring back fully. It takes a few times to get the hang of what you’re looking for, so if you just follow the timing above you should be good. If you choose to refrigerate overnight, leave the dough cold until you’re ready to bake and transfer it directly to the dutch oven.

Baking

You’ll want oven mitts, things are going to get hot. Pre-heat the oven to 245°C/475°F with the dutch oven inside for about 45 minutes prior to baking. Place the dutch oven and its lid side by side in your oven so that the interior heats fully. If you don’t pre-heat long enough, your bread will stick and rip when you try to remove it, which is no fun.

When your loaf is proofed and ready to bake, use the same hand-blade technique to carefully separate it from the proofing bowl and drop it right into the middle of the dutch oven. Put the lid on, and bake for 30 minutes covered.

Remove the lid, and then bake for 5-20 minutes longer until the crust is a nice darker brown, with the edges just starting to blacken. Everyone’s oven is different here, so watch closely the first few times and get a feel for how long yours takes.

Flip the dutch oven over to transfer the bread to a cooling rack, and let it cool thoroughly. See Storage below for more tips.

Enjoy!

Sourdough Bread Recipe

The process for sourdough is mostly the same, with the addition of living organisms in the starter that you need to keep happy, and a longer time frame to produce a loaf.

I find sourdough bread a lot more complex and interesting, and make it almost exclusively. If you get the timing just right, instead of being overly sour it take on more of a creamy flavour.

I store my starter in the fridge when I’m not baking so I don’t have to feed it every day, which requires revival of at least two feedings before baking. This causes me to choose a time that I’ll bake and plan backwards accordingly. Say I’m baking on Sunday morning – I need to start reviving the starter on Thursday night by feeding it, letting it rise for 24 hours, then feeding it again Friday night. On Saturday morning I mix the dough, and by Saturday evening I’ve started proofing for the next morning’s bake. If you’ve used the starter recently, you can skip the first feeding.

Once you have a happy, thriving starter, you’ll be incorporating a bunch of it directly into the dough and then following the process outlined in the Basic Yeast-only Bread Recipe above. Here’s a basic sourdough recipe:

350g white flour
50g whole wheat flour
290g water
180g sourdough starter
10.5g salt
1g baker’s yeast

Aside from the recipe differences and the starter feeding, follow the exact same process outlined above. For sourdough I like to make sure I’m proofing overnight in the fridge to really allow the flavour to develop.

Feeding the Starter

Your starter is a combination of dozens, if not hundreds of species of bacteria and yeasts. Think of it as a plant: it needs occasional feeding to keep it healthy.

To feed, mix together 100g water, 100g white flour, 25g whole wheat, and 25g starter. (It’s easiest to mix if you combine the starter and water together first into a soupy paste then add the flour.) Store it in a warm place to let it rise. The rest of the starter left over from the last feeding is basically spent fuel, there’s not much you can do with it if you’re not baking, so I compost it. It’s wasteful for sure, so I try to optimize my feeding schedule to keep it minimal.

If I’m not baking regularly, I feed once a week. I pull the starter out of the fridge to warm it up for a half hour or so, I feed it, let it rise for 12 hours, then put it back in the fridge. Sometimes I forget and it goes two weeks between feedings. While that’s a bit risky, aside from greying edges and a funkier smell it’s almost always fine. I killed a starter this way once when I let it go too long and it developed black mold, so there is a risk in not feeding enough.

Getting a Starter

The easiest way to do this is to just ask for some from a friend who already has one. They’re continuously discarding it when they feed it, so they’ll have plenty of extra to go around.

But maybe you don’t have access to an existing starter. No problem, they’re actually a lot easier to make than you’d think. I’ve captured two wild starters, one took a week and the second only took a couple of days.

Extras

Recipe Variations

The recipes above are a starting point. You can play with flour proportions, you can introduce other kinds of flour, you can add other stuff to your bread. Some variations that have worked well for me:

200g white flour, 200g whole wheat flour
300g white flour, 100g rye flour
Potato flour with stout instead of water
Seed blends
Spent barley (from beer brewing)
Half a cup of parmesan and chopped rosemary
Half a pound of bacon

When adjusting flour proportions you’ll probably want to add more or less water, depending on the flour. Whole wheat can use a little more, rye can use a little less. I’d suggest doing a loaf and judging whether it came out too dense (add more water) or too soggy (add less) and trying again after an adjustment.

Fancy Bread

You have a choice. One, you can simply make bread. Or two, you can make fancy bread. For your first few bakes though, keep it simple and skip this part.

After you have the basics down, there are a couple of techniques you can use to really dress up your loaf. A light flour dusting on top just before going into the oven looks great once it comes out. If you have a pastry brush, run it over the flour to spread it evenly for an even more refined look.

And while bread scoring is a bit of a fiddly art, if you have a really sharp knife nearby don’t be afraid to cut a quick x or criss-cross pattern across the top. A 1/4” deep is enough. Once you get the hang of it, your bread will look like it came from the oven of a professional bakery.

Storage

After you pull the bread out of the oven, you’ll need to let it rest for 20 minutes or so to cool down to a reasonable temperature before slicing into it. And for the first few tries, you’ll definitely want to for that instant gratification of a job well done.

But bread fresh out of the oven is brittle — it has a crunchy, hard crust that flakes and shatters when you cut into it. Since I prefer a chewier crust that doesn’t cause massive cleanup, I let my bread cool completely (8 hours should do it) and then store it in a big ziplock bag on the counter for up to a week to let the humidity soften it up. I don’t store bread in the fridge — it lasts a bit longer in the fridge, but takes on a soggy texture.

Books

If you want to dig deeper, I highly recommend the book I learned most of this from, Flour Water Salt Yeast. It can be a little precious at times and I’ve definitely adapted some of the techniques, but it’s great for foundational theory that you can branch off from.

And I haven’t read it, lots of people swear by Tartine Bread.

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