Bread Tartine

[Mireille Kreines]

Sprinklesome flour on top of your dough and divide into two halves. Take a half, flip it over and pull each of 4 edges from under onto the top. Then, flip the folded dough over, so the seam is on your work surface. You want to form loose boules here by using your hand and your dough knife. Your work surface grabs the bottom of the dough slightly as you spin the dough around to make a little ball. Repeat with the other half and cover (I cover with two inverted mixing bowls) for 30 minutes.

Spin the dough using your two hands to shape into a boule. As you slightly pick up the dough and spin it, the bottom snags the unfloured work surface and creates tension. I do this several times to create a very taught surface on the top of the boule. Sometimes small air bubbles will be visible.

Place towels into small mixing bowls or proofing baskets and dust with white rice flour. These bowls will hold the dough as they proof in the fridge overnight. Take your taught boules and place them into the floured bowls with the seam *up* facing you. I place each of my bowls into plastic bags and then into the fridge.

The first of these sourdough loaves was retarded for 18 hours. The Tartine formula lists an 8-hour cool fermentation in the fridge but 18-20 hours seems to be the sweet spot for me as my bread takes on a complex flavor with this extended fermentation time. It also seems to help open up the crumb more than what you would typically see; I strive for that light and soft interior.

After pulling the loaves from the oven, I cool them on a wire rack for at least one hour before cutting into them. Cutting too soon can cause the crust to harden drastically and the inside to become quite dense. Easier said than done, however.

Learn to bake bread like a pro from the first easy loaf bread to complex and tasty sourdoughs. You will learn proper bread baking techniques and methods and use them to create the loaf you dream about and in a way that fits a busy schedule.

Amazon Associates Disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. Participation in this program helps us offset the costs of maintaining this website and helps us to continue providing the best possible bread content!

I'm familiar with bread baking and with sourdoughs, but I've not seen either cookbook. I've heard a lot of buzz about #3 but am not sure whether or not I should start with the original or if 3 can stand on its own.

Thanks for the link Phil. It's a great help to see a baker working with their dough. Sometimes I see comment here that the tools we rely on, scales and such, are not needed, that bread has been made for thousands of years without them. What such commenters neglect is that people regularly saw bread being made, handled it themselves and learned what the dough feels like and how it behaves. Clips like this on YouTube are such a gift to those unfamiliar with handling bread dough.

I also noticed he didn't preheat. Everytime I use a dutch oven I get burned trying to get the dough into it, or deflate the loaf by dropping it because I don't want to get burned. I see this guy makes great loaves without preheating. So that alone made this video extremely helpful. Thanks for posting. -Varda

I've been wondering: If not preheated, then how about a stainless steel DO bottom overturned over your dough on a stone? I currently use a preheated ceramic/cast iron DO bottom overturned on my stone -- a bit cumbersome in a small wall oven. Stainless would heat up fast (like conventional breadpans do), but perhaps slow enough to allow more spring than the blast of radiant heat that loaves get from that preheated cast iron helmet. Might try that this weekend....

The topic of not preheating has definitely been discussed in the past. I personally don't like the results as much and I have had definite sticking issues with the loaves glueing themselves to the pan. Not a pretty sight to remove! I suspect the heavy cornmeal serves two pursposes of protecting the bottom from burning and eliminating the sticking problem.

I also personally prefer ceramic cloches but that is probably because I have them and they seem to have a slightly "gentler" heat. And I do preheat them to about 450 to 465 dependng on the bread I am baking.

A stainless lid is fine. So is a bowl or an aluminum dome from say a roasting pan. All you have to do is trap the moisture - but you would like the size of the dome to be reasonably close to the size of the finished loaf in order to maximize the benefit from the steam. The key is getting a good fit/seal - the better the better!

Wow, good point Jay. Anything that seals, yes. And we have some nice deep stainless bowls we bought from Whole Foods because they sit perfectly inside the rim of a (well weighted) 5 gallon bucket -- for providing our dogs with water. I think I'll wash out one of those tomorrow and try that over my my loaf on the stone.

One thing about using a pre-heated iron dutch oven as a cover over a baking stone is baking multiple loaves: After one's done I have to put the DO back in to re-heat it. Makes for longer than I'd like to be leaving the oven on. Our power company isn't that needy.

I am lucky! I actually have three ovens in my kitchen so I have spare ovens for keeping my cloche lids hot. One of the beauties of a steel bowl is it is thin and has minimal heat up time. And the stone is already hot so!!!

Wondering what changes, if any, to his formula will result from using that different flour....Kind of like what happened when MC got Rubaud to try something different with his 'standard' procedure....Bread history in the making :-)

Hi Phil! Shaping is amazingly no longer so magic to me. As enlightening as you found the shaping, I don't feel it was uniquely different from what I have seen Peter Reinhart or Mac McConnel (SFBI) do. The more you have a touch for the dough the less magical it becomes. Yet, on the other side, I know it can seem so intimidating. It really helps to watch a master up close and personal, I think, and to learn the touch/feel of great dough. When the dough is right, that kind of shaping is easy. If it is not right, one can end up wearing the loaf! :o) The difference can seem very subtle but...if the dough is right, it can be easy and if it is wrong......

I preheat my DO when I bake and often got little burns. I bought lined leather welders gloves -- $10 -- that cover your wrist and half your forearm. You can get them at any hardware store. You can't hold a hot dutch oven tightly or for a long time, but for the quick transfer or removal of a lid they're terrific. Easy fix, inexpensive, and no more burns at all.

For well over a year I've been baking boules in my cast iron dutch ovens without preheating and I was interested that, in this video, Chad Robertson didn't preheat the DO either. That's a change from the instructions in his book.

....they're so high in the DO after proofing, those Lodge combo DO lids must be deeper than I thought to accommodate even that small, but clearly adequate, level of spring you got. They do look lovely. Wish I could taste 'em...

TFL member ehanner told me the interior height of the lodge 3-qt combo cooker is about 4.25". Although my DO is smaller capacity, it's height is the same as the 3-qt combo cooker (the combo cooker simply has a wider base). With the skillet as the top, I have an interior height of about 4.5".

And you had no trouble with sticking? Do you put corn meal on the bottom and sides? I find that with repeated use there is very little seasoning left in the DO and it's hard to imagine that it doesn't stick.

...I lightly grease the DO with a solid fat (I use home rendered lard; if you're adverse to pig fat you could use butter). This helps the dough rise during the final proof as well as reseasoning my non-enameled DO when the bread bakes. I also scatter a thin layer of coarse corn grits in the bottom of the pot, topped with a round of parchment paper. This prevents sticking and scorching of the loaf's bottom during the bake.

In the video (at about the 4 minute 10 second mark) Chad Robertson uses corn meal to prevent sticking (but no parchment paper - master bakers don't need parchment paper!). His dough rises in bannetons so there's no greasing of the pot.

proofing in the DO for 2 hrs and then retard it in the fridge for up to 24 hours. I bring it out of the fridge for 1 hour while the oven gets hot (500 F) , I spray my DO with PAM and then line the bottom with parchment before the bread goes in for proof. No sticking and perfect dark brown with a cracked crust. Here is a loaf of St Paddy's day bread I Baked this morning. I thought it interesting that he uses such young starter/levain and has 4 hrs for development as a result.

This is a fairly wild guess, but I think it's safe to assume that the dough in the video is 100% hi-E. His basic Tartine CB formula calls for 9:1 ratio of white to whole wheat. That combo adds up to a hi-E flour. Rather than specify hi-E that many readers wouldn't be able to find, he has you concoct it as a 9:1. Based on that, there's no reason that I can think of to believe he's using anything but hi-E in the Danish masterclass.

Psychologal researchers have found that people routinely describe processes that can be quite different from what they actually do - a danger with all "instructions". While what Chad does in the video is rather radically different in certain respects from the book, my observation is tempered by the fact that he clearly considered the book a modification of his technique to meet home baking needs. Thus I am left to wonder whether what we saw in the video is closer to what he normally does - or an evolution of his technique????

3a8082e126