How to Make 3 Artisanal Breads from 13 Ingredients _ Handcrafted _ Bon Appétit

My name is Chad Robertson .

I'm the co-founder of Tartine .

And today I'm gonna turn these ingredients into our three essential breads that we make at Tartine bakery .

First , I'll make the Len which is sourdough and we'll use that in all three breads .

The three essential breads are a country sourdough , a porridge bread and a sprouted rye bread .

First , we'll mix our doughs and then we'll be dividing and shaping the dough , baking the dough and then cutting the loaf .

Then we're gonna start with mixing the Len to make a Len or a sourdough starter from scratch .

And you just start with flour and water and you mix it together and you keep it in a relatively warm place and let it start fermenting over 3 to 4 to 5 days .

And then you take a little seed of that and seed another batch with feeding it fresh flour and fresh water until it starts to act very predictably .

So we're taking the preexisting sourdough 11 , that's one hour to two hours from the last feeding .

So it's pretty young .

Break the sourdough up in the water first and then add the flour and incorporate by hand I added in that sequence just because it tends to be the least messy when you're working at home with a little bowl .

Just takes a few minutes to incorporate .

So you don't have any flour lumps .

So we're going for something that would be considered close to a liquid leven .

It's a little thicker and it's easy to stir with your hand .

It doesn't really form a dough , but it's also not soupy .

So I would say a pretty wet batter without any lumps in it .

And once it's relatively smooth , you can let it rest .

So I'll transfer the van into a jar here , cover it and keep it in a warm place and we'll use it in the next couple of hours as we mix these dough .

Next , we'll mix our doughs and we're gonna start with the country sourdough .

So mixing the country sourdough is essentially the same thing as mixing the Leven .

Its timing and inoculation are different and then it has the addition of salt .

The country bread is a classic sourdough bread that we're known for and is pretty universally popular .

It's sort of like a chocolate chip cookie .

It's , there's nothing challenging about it , but it's , it's a really good bread and it goes with everything .

The sourdough .

Levin serves a lot of purposes .

One of them is adding gas as it's fermenting and gives you volume and lift and a light texture on the inside .

The other thing is add a very distinctive flavor .

The longer the rise up to a point , the more sort of layers and depth of flavor that you can develop at tartine .

We start with the very young sourdough , meaning we don't leave too many hours in between the feedings .

We feed it quite often .

So it stays at a pretty young stage of growth just to keep the acidity lower because generally we do very long final rises and that acid sort of builds during that long final rise .

So we want to start with as little acid as possible .

This part of incorporating the ingredients is there's no real trick here .

I'm just trying to incorporate everything together as efficiently and cleanly as possible .

And I just use my hand , you could certainly use spatulas and scrapers and things .

So after we do that initial mix without the salt , we let it rest for about 15 to 20 minutes , the French have a term for this .

It's called and it's just leaving it to rest so the dough can start forming on its own during the rest period .

A few things are happening .

It's starting to ferment and the bacteria in the yeast are starting to multiply .

At the same time , the starches are swelling , they're absorbing the water and then the gluten strands are starting to align and develop .

So we'll come back after 20 minutes and start to incorporate the salt into the dough using a little bit of water to moisten our hand and to kind of help to dissolve that salt in as we cut and fold it into the dough , the salt will temper the fermentation and also tends to give you some strength in the gluten .

It makes it contract in a way that you want , especially when you're making really high hydration doughs .

So we're gonna cover the dough now and it's starting its bulk rise part of the fermentation which is rising in , in one big mass of dough .

During that 3 to 4 hours , we'll give it turns every 20 minutes to half an hour to do those turns .

We just fold the dough over itself a few times to continue to develop the strength and the gluten of the dough .

Next , we're gonna mix our porridge bread dough which starts with cooking porridge , which is essentially making oatmeal for our porridge .

We use a blend of oats and purple barley flakes and we do season it with a little bit of salt , having those fully cooked jelled starches added to the bread dough at the end releases the bound moisture that's been cooked into that grain and gives you an extra moist bread that keeps for longer than a traditional bread without cooked grain .

So the porridge acts as a very basic sort of natural preservative by just keeping the bread moisture for longer .

The main thing you want is to really have enough water there to gel all the starch as you're cooking it .

So it's important that it's not super dry and that it's fully cooked .

So once it's finally cooked , you're just gonna wanna spread it on a sheet pan or hotel pan .

So I'm spreading the porridge out thin so it can cool .

I'm gonna set it aside for 20 minutes , half an hour .

You could also do it a day in advance and just let it cool down .

And next , we'll mix the dough for the porch bread .

So the porridge bread is essentially a country bread with some added cooked grain to it .

The one that we make at tartine has a lot more whole grain in the basic dough .

So that's a difference .

But it's still , the technique is really the same .

And you could certainly make a straight country dough and add porch to it , which we've done many times when I was learning to be a baker .

In the early nineties , there wasn't a lot of diversity in the grains that we could use in bread .

We generally had in the US , white flour and wheat flour to work with .

And the porch technique really sort of gave us a much more diverse pall of grains to use in the bread .

So it was like going from black and white to color over the last six or seven years , we've been working with grain breeders and farmers very closely to expand on the diversity of grains that we get to work with .

And now we approach it in just the same way that we approach sourcing our , our carrots and our tomatoes and beef and everything else .

We work directly with the people that are growing and raising these things and it's made baking a much more interesting thing to do .

I'll let this dough rest about 20 minutes and by that time , the porridge will be cool and I can add the salt and give the dough a couple of turns and then start incorporating the porridge .

So you want to develop the dough a little bit before adding the porridge .

When you're mixing by hand , it's , it's sort of every time you give it a turn , it's getting more air and more strength and developing more .

If you have to cut the porridge in by hand , at the very end , when you're ready to divide it , it's gonna sort of degas your dough in a way that you don't want .

So add it earlier in the stage of mixing and then develop it very gently over the course of folding and turning for a few hours .

So I cut the salt in the same way for the country dough .

And then we're gonna add the porridge in again , just really trying to make sure that it's all incorporated so that I can let it rest and that dough formation can happen on its own .

Once the porridge is fully incorporated , I'm gonna set this aside in a warm place and let it continue to bolt ferment , giving it turns every 20 minutes to continue to develop the structure of the dough .

Now , I'll mix the sprouted r dough which we call Renee's right .

It's an homage to a chef named Renee Bolg who generously shared his recipe with me six or seven years ago when I first started going to Denmark , there are more ingredients in this bread than the other two breads of the country in the porridge .

Mixing this , you develop a little bit of structure from the minimal amount of flour in the bread .

But really you're , you're stirring to incorporate and then you're kind of letting it ferment in bulk in a similar way , but you're not really developing too much gluten as this spread is really like a batter and it goes into a pan and the pan is what gives it most of its structure .

The liquids again going in first we have some water , some buttermilk dark beer , which is traditional in a lot of German breads and all the alcohol bakes out .

But you get a really nice flavor .

A little bit of dark malt syrup and adds a um sort of toasted barley malt flavor , which is really nice in this bread .

Again , the Len goes into liquids , break it up by hand and a couple of different kinds of flour .

We're using a little bit of rye and a little bit of spelt .

There's no really hard rule on that .

You can use all different kinds of flour per your preference .

Then we add the seeds in sesame flax seeds , pumpkin , really everything just gets added .

And you're gonna end up with kind of a wet concrete like batter , mix everything together and then add the sprouted grains at the end again , just cutting them in by hand , scraping the sides of the bowl until everything is evenly incorporated in the early stage .

It's gonna be pretty wet , It gets a little bit thicker as all the seeds and the uh sprouted grains start absorbing some of those liquids salt .

In the end , we don't really have to do an auto lease because the structure is not really solely relying on gluten development .

So you definitely wanna add everything in , make sure it's all moist .

You could certainly give it an auto lease if you want , but it's not as critical of a step .

So now we're in the bolt fermentation for our doughs and we're going to be giving it the folds and turns to develop strength .

You take the dough from where they're resting , uncover them .

I dip my hand in water that way , the dough doesn't stick to it so much and just reach down underneath the dough and pull it over itself and turn the bowl .

And people have again , different techniques and different sort of rituals of how many times they do it .

But essentially you're just folding it onto itself and it develops strength also gives you a chance as you're making the bread to feel how it's developing every time you give it a turn , you're affecting the fermentation , but you're also sort of checking in on the dough and , and you have a sense of how fast it's going or how slow it's going , or maybe it's not feeling as like it's getting the strength that you want .

And so you give it an extra turn .

So you're sort of checking in on the dough .

And these are our doughs after they've sat for 3 to 4 hours , the full bulk fermentation .

Now we're getting into dividing and shaping the dough dividing is basically also weighing the dough from a larger mass , which is the bulk into the individual pieces , which would be the final loaf size and then shaping the goal is always to achieve the final shape that you want .

After it rises , I dip my hand in water again and then there's a little water on the table and we just use the bench knife there , dough scraper as kind of an extension of your hand , which really you sort of need that when you're working with wet dose because it doesn't stick to the metal as much as it sticks to your hand .

We do a gentle rounding using that bench knife and the other hand sort of tucking the outer edge of the dough under itself while you're rotating it with your other hand in a circular motion , we use water on the table for dividing instead of flour .

For a lot of reasons , we don't want to incorporate more raw flour into the dough than we have to .

Also , we're just trying to minimize the amount of flour that's in the air because over time bakers can develop allergies and it's just from breathing flour all day .

So we try to minimize that and it makes a huge difference .

That was the country dough .

This is the porridge , same exact process .

Basically , we try to not degas it too much .

It's a pretty gentle rounding pre shape and try to use as few turns as we can to get it into the shape that we want .

I didn't use a scale as you can see , you absolutely could and should , if you want to be really precise , I was just kind of eyeballing it here .

And I also cut an extra two on , on each of them just to give a little more of a demonstration of how we do our pre shape .

But I'm actually only gonna make two loaves with each of these dough .

So there's no flour on the table , there's no flour on the top .

So it's pretty easy to just lay one on top of the other after they relax a little bit and make it into one loaf .

This is the sprouted rye .

It's pretty sticky .

And when I say it has the consistency of wet concrete .

It also sticks like wet concrete .

So you wanna sort of empty that out carefully into the pan and then make sure to clean your bowls or whatever utensils you have that have that dough on it .

The other two doughs will sort of dry and flake off .

The rye dough will stick like glue .

So you wanna just clean that stuff quickly .

The country in the porch does get a gentle pres shape and then they get a final shape .

This bread , it's very forgiving .

So you just dump it into the pan and then smooth over the top with your hand just dipped in some water .

So that doesn't stick and it's good to go until it's ready to bake .

So with the country and the porridge , you want to give them a bench rest .

If I try to shape these immediately , which you could do , they will be a little bit too elastic .

You want to give them time to relax in an ideal world .

You're giving it 15 to 20 minutes rest and then they're relaxed enough so you can do the final shape .

So there's really nothing else to do for the sprouted rye bread except let it rise in a cool chamber overnight .

So I'm gonna take that away and cover it with something that can breathe a little bit and be ready to bake the next day .

So , in preparation for the final shaping , I'm bringing a little flour onto the table , see if flowered one piece since I'm combining them .

I didn't f flower the other one because I didn't want to put raw flour on the inside .

We try to keep the flour just on the outside of the loaf as much as possible .

Our shaping technique , we flip it over .

So the flour on the underside , fold the bottom up , fold the two sides over sort of into a cylinder and then start folding the tops and sort of stitching the two sides together .

And then at the end , when you have this sort of stitched long piece , you fold it over itself and then , you know , you're basically just kind of strategically folding this thing into itself and then kind of leaving the seam on the underside and careful to put the bread down to rest on the bench where there's no flour because you really want that underside , which is a seam that you've just created .

You want that to seal itself as it rests on the bench for , you know , five minutes , 10 minutes , something like that .

Shaping is , you know , there are thousands of techniques all over the world for getting similar things and different things and thousands of shapes of bread .

But the goal is always to kind of achieve the final shape that you want after it rises .

And for me shaping a tartine , it's about leaving that air intact that you've developed over this bulk rise , sort of gentle mixing in the gentle bulk rice .

We don't degas the dough , but we try to really keep all that air in there .

It's not , not just because it gives you an open crumb , but because that's the gas that's come off of fermentation .

So it's , it has an aroma and it affects the final flavor and we really want to keep that intact .

So they're all shaped .

But we let them rest a little bit again so that the seam seals on the bottom .

Now that the do have sort of relaxed and rested on the bench , we're gonna give them their final shape at tartine .

We prep all the baskets in advance flouring them with a mixture of rice flour and wheat flour .

The rice flour just being pure starch , so it absorbs a little of the moisture and the linen actually gets really moist .

The rice flour helps the bread not to stick when we're dumping it out the next day .

So as you see , I'm picking these up , seam is up and then you kind of fold the seam in on itself again .

And that's one of the reasons you really need it to be sealing on a bench that doesn't have any flour .

Those are the two country loaves and then we roll the porridge in some rolled oats or you can , you can roll it in whatever you want , but we roll it in something that reflects what the porridge is made of .

You could leave these baskets out at room temp and they'd be ready to bake in four or 56 hours .

I really like a minimum of 8 to 12 hours .

And to do that , you need to have a cooler chamber than room temp .

So we take all these baskets and they go into climate controlled boxes and it makes it more digestible .

It develops a lot more flavor during that final rise and you really want them to be kind of at that point .

So these dough have gone through the long slow cool rise overnight .

Finally , it's time to bake these breads .

So we preheat the Dutch oven to 500 degrees .

Add some rice flour on the top of the loaf , which is pretty moist and sticky at this point .

We just don't want it to stick in the pan carefully , invert that bread into the Dutch oven and then score it with a knife or a very thin double edged blade , which is what we use carefully again , get the lid back on and then place it into the preheated oven .

The Dutch oven just creates a sealed chamber inside of the larger oven and that creates a steam saturated environment around the loaf of bread , which is what you want .

It's what you want in the beginning of the baking process .

So the loaf can expand but it won't caramelize until you take that top off .

Two thirds of the way through the bake and let the steam escape .

And now it's gonna start browning and caramelizing and developing those flavors and colors and the crust that you want on a deeply caramelized loaf of bread .

So once the bread is baked , the crust is formed and you're getting the color that you want .

I like mine dark golden brown .

You want to tip the loaf out of the Dutch oven onto a wire cooling rack .

Any kind of a rack works as long as there's air circulation and the crust doesn't get soggy .

Porridge is the same baking technique as the country .

So add some rice flour to the bottom of the loaf .

So it doesn't stick because you're going to invert it into the hot Dutch oven carefully .

This one has the grains on the outside and it's hard to get the blade through it .

So I use scissors for the same effect .

It's just a different way to score a few different purposes of scoring .

It's , you know , everyone says it's a baker's signature .

People score differently , but really the loaf is gonna rise and sort of blow in the oven as it's expanding and it's forming across at the same time .

So you're basically just determining how that's gonna happen .

Different bread traditions have different ways of doing that and we just do one long cut because it's simple and it can come out very elegant if all other factors are working the way we want , remove the lid two thirds of the way through just so you can start developing a real crust and getting some of that caramelization coloring by releasing the steam .

So after 40 to 50 minutes , I would say when the loaf has the color of the crust that you want , carefully remove the dutch oven tip , the loaf out onto a wire rack to cool .

So the sprouted rye just goes directly into the oven .

At tartine , we inject the oven with steam .

You could spray a little water on top of this if you wanted to .

But if it's moist , just put it in the oven , it's much denser than the country in porridge .

And so I would say you want to bake this one longer than you think you need to .

And if it's getting dark on top or even before it starts getting dark , cover it with foil and bake it 10 , 15 minutes longer just to make sure that it's fully cooked in the center .

Once the sprouted rye is fully baked out , tip it out of the pan and place it on a wire rack to cool .

These are the final loaves cooled and ready to cut country porridge and sprouted rye .

I've been making bread and cooking for over 25 years and I started because I thought that baking bread and cooking would mean that I could travel anywhere in the world and find work and feed people and that I would always have food and it's turned out to be all that and way , way more .

I tasted what I consider really good bread for the first time when I was 21 .

And I instantly thought , you know , I need to learn how to do this .

Now , I'm sort of really trying to make this kind of food more available to more people and to give the next generation of bakers something to build on , that's meaningful and hopefully leave some ideas out there that people can build on and really move the needle .