Pan loaves may not be sexy, but they sure are liberating
I stumbled on Ken Forkish’s Evolutions in Bread just as I was giving up on baking sourdough bread.
Giving up was, perhaps, too strong a term. More accurate: letting my starter languish in the back of the fridge for weeks. Reading my sourdough-baking newsletters, sighing, and hitting delete. During the pandemic, I had become the kind of baker who bought a grain mill to grind local, heirloom wheats. Then I became the kind of baker who never found the time to bake.
I picked up Forkish’s 2022 book because, after moving to Portland, Oregon, it seemed like the neighborly thing to do. The French-trained founder of the city’s iconic Ken’s Artisan Bakery and Ken’s Artisan Pizza, Forkish was one of the architects of the sourdough movement that caught the public’s imagination after Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread came out in 2010. Forkish’s own 2012 cookbook, Flour Salt Water Yeast, is still one of the best reference works for home cooks who want to bake crusty, naturally leavened, country-style breads.
The new Forkish book’s main recipe was unlike anything I’d seen. It asked me to combine cold sourdough starter and commercial yeast, do a little minimal stretching and shaping, and bake the bread in a loaf pan — my pans were so neglected and manky that I had to buy new ones. The recipe took five hours, yet the resulting loaf had the same complex, earthy flavor as 24-hour breads. I baked another loaf, using a different flour blend. Same results.
The grains came back out of the freezer. The starter bubbled away on the counter. I became a home baker again.
There’s a twofold promise in the naturally leavened breads mastered by Robertson, Forkish, and the professional bakers who came of age after them. There is the loaf itself: an elementally crusty, swollen dome that splits dramatically along the baker’s seam. A bubbly, latticed crumb. A flavor that is true to the grain and yet fuller, sharpened by a hint of acidity.
And then there is the process, which might more likely be described as a lifestyle. The sourdough way calls for you to make bread on bread’s time, tending to a living bacterial culture with more care than you would your houseplants. Making these naturally leavened breads requires any baker to master a constellation of finicky factors: temperature, age of sourdough starter, when to manipulate the dough and how.
Hundreds of online baking teachers have stepped up to teach us how. There are precision-obsessed sourdough engineers who test every variable. Sourdough globalists who merge French techniques with Latin American bread styles or Asian ingredients. Tradwife influencers who cache their labor in domestic bliss.
YouTube and TikTok have simultaneously democratized the learning process — you can now spend an afternoon watching videos to diagnose what you’re doing wrong — and incited some serious one-upmanship. In order to make your bread taller and airier, should you do stretch-and-folds, slap-and-folds, coil folds, full laminations, or the ever-so-slightly obscene Rubaud method? Will you get better results by investing in a heated proofing box, a specialty cast-iron bread pan, or a German grain mill? Should you etch intricate patterns, or even erect penises, into the surface of the loaf before it goes into the oven?
The stakes are high, even for people who aren’t hoping to post their crumbshot on Instagram. High-hydration, naturally leavened, free-formed loaves of bread are unforgiving, and successful cookbooks are filled with exquisitely precise recipes. And yet, even if you get the measurements exactly right, success or failure depends on the kinds of sensory knowledge that only experience can teach. The less frequently you bake, the higher the failure rate.
I grew up kneading bread at my mothers’ elbow during the 1970s whole-wheat era, and I have never stopped baking for myself. As a Tartine bread enthusiast, I wrestled with Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread recipe for six months in 2010 before I figured out how to make it work. His second book, Tartine No. 3, got me hooked on ancient grains. Then I started an office job and stopped using sourdough. In my pandemic isolation, I trained myself to bake these breads again.
After a few years, however, I grew weary of the risk-to-reward ratio. Sure, the sourdough lifestyle fits easily into a remote career. But my household of two doesn’t justify me baking every day. Trying out a new recipe required me to feed the starter for a few days in advance, tossing a few dollars’ worth of ingredients in the trash until it was lively and sweet-smelling again. Then, if the whole-grain flour I bought wasn’t well suited to the exact proportions of the recipe, or I didn’t Rubaud, slap, and coil my dough enough, 18 hours’ worth of effort would yield another crusty pancake.
After a hundred airy, free-form loaves and a third as many flat disasters, I realized: If I want professional bread, I can just buy it from the pros. Instead, I want to bake whenever I feel like it. I want to bake by vibes alone.
During the pandemic, Forkish says, he spent a lot of time at home, away from his own restaurants and bakeries. He was burned out on the food industry and plotting an escape to Hawai’i. (In 2022, Forkish sold Ken’s Artisan Bakery and Ken’s Artisan Pizza to a group of friends and employees.)
He’d spent decades teaching people how to bake like a professional, but when he was only making a loaf at a time for his own use, he had to teach himself how to think like the rest of us. “I had the benefit of 10 years worth of feedback from readers,” he says. “It gave me more sensitivity to the point of view of a home baker.”
He filtered everything he knew about bread through the lens of his post-restaurateur life: When it comes to making bread rise, commercial yeast is a workhorse, but a bland one, so he added starter just for flavor. Switching from a free-form boule or batard shape to a pan loaf made it easy to use ancient grains like spelt, kamut, or einkorn, which don’t have the kind of gluten that allows them to form airy, high breads without a lot of trial and error. Forkish came up with a method for maintaining a healthy starter culture in the fridge. He streamlined the baking process, too. “The recipe’s not so geeked out that you have to go through 25 steps to get to your finished loaf,” he says.
Forkish is still a little puzzled over why his new approach hasn’t caught on with the baking public yet. My guess would be that pan loaves just aren’t sexy enough. It is an achievement to produce a gorgeous domed loaf of bread, and gratifying to slice it open in front of your guests. Giving friends a lovely thing you’ve baked is a lovely way to make them feel special. On a more cynical note, loaf pans make the process too convenient, too reliable; using them doesn’t require an aspiring baker to study hours of ad-sponsored bread content. Nevertheless, Forkish still believes in his new approach. This spring, he worked with illustrator Sarah Becan to turn Evolutions in Bread into Let’s Make Bread, a graphic cookbook that’s even more accessible.
The more I’ve used Forkish’s main recipe, the more I’ve realized how much I missed baking everyday bread. Pan loaves aren’t Instagram-sexy. But I can make toast and sandwiches out of them, and when I spread butter or jam onto a slice, it doesn’t drip out through the air holes and stain my shirt. I don’t have to spend three days restoring the health of my starter before I bake. I can wake up and add whatever flour is lurking in my pantry — right now it’s an experimental Climate Blend from Washington State University.
Last week, I got sucked into four hours of Zoom meetings and screwed up every stage of the process. I had to pour a sticky, bubbly mass of overproofed dough into the pan instead of forming the loaf properly. Were the results photogenic? Hardly. We still ate every slice.
There are many ways you can refine this recipe — there’s a reason Forkish wrote a whole book around his new approach to baking. This is the un-author-approved, minimal effort it takes to produce a delicious loaf of bread.
Ken Forkish’s Bread Recipe, Massively Simplified
Makes one 9-by-4-inch loaf
Ingredients:
275 grams white bread flour
275 grams whole-wheat flour*
12 grams salt (kosher preferred)
1 teaspoon (3 grams) dry yeast
Refrigerated sourdough starter (it can be asleep, but it needs to be alive)
Equipment:
Kitchen scale that measures grams
2-quart food storage container with lid
9”x4”x4” Pullman loaf pan (optional, but this pan’s high walls make the loaf reliably photogenic)
Instructions:
Step 1: The night before you bake: Mix 25 grams of white flour, 25 grams of wheat flour, and 50 grams of water with a tablespoon of the starter you keep in your fridge. Cover. Forkish has a whole process of building a starter that you keep in the fridge and only feed once a week; it’s awesome, but this is in case you haven’t done that.
Step 2: When you’re ready to bake: Set your dough tub on the scale, and pour in between 400 and 410 grams of lukewarm water. Dump 100 grams of the levain you mixed up the night before into that water, and swish it around. Then add the remaining 500 grams of flour, and stir. Once your dough is a shaggy mess, sprinkle the salt and dry yeast over the top. Cover the tub with the lid, and let it sit for a half-hour so the flour properly absorbs the water.
Step 3: Next, wet your hand and spend a minute mixing everything together. Pull out one side of the dough and flip it over the lump; rotate the bowl a quarter turn, and do it again. Every few turns, curl your thumb and index finger into a pincer and squeeze-cut through the dough in a few different directions. Repeat both steps until the salt and yeast are fully incorporated. (Here’s Forkish demonstrating this technique on YouTube.)
Step 4: Now, put the lid back on the container and stick it into the oven with the light on for warmth. After 15 minutes, do a round of stretch-and-folds: Using a wet hand, reach along the side of the tub, pull up the bottom, and stretch it over the top to the other side. Rotate your tub a quarter turn and do it again. (Here’s Forkish’s demo.) After you make your way around the loaf, pop the cover back on the tub, and let it rise for 30 minutes and do it one more time.
Step 5: After the second set of folds, let the dough rise until it’s about 2.5 times the size — in a warm oven, this usually takes about 2 hours. Using a tub with measuring lines on the side makes this easy to gauge.
Step 6: Oil your baking pan, then shape your loaf: Flour a work surface, then gently coax the blob of dough onto it. If you can, roll the mass up. This will be a mess, so do whatever it takes to maneuver the dough into the pan. (Here’s Ken demonstrating how to do this properly.) Cover it with a plastic bag and leave it on the countertop to rise 50-75 percent more — about 90 minutes.
Step 7: While the loaf is proofing, heat the oven to 425 degrees for 30-45 minutes. Bake the bread for 50 minutes. Pull it out of the oven. Tip it onto a rack to cool. That’s it.
* Any grain with gluten: wheat, einkorn, emmer, durum, kamut, spelt. Forkish’s books have recipes that incorporate smaller amounts of other low- or no-gluten grains such as rye, buckwheat, corn, oats, or rice.
Jonathan Kauffman is a Beard Award-winning journalist based in Portland, Oregon, and the author of Hippie Food, a history of the 1970s natural-foods movement. A Place Is a Gift, his free newsletter, chronicles his quest to eat his neighborhood.
Additional photo illustration credits: bread photo by Jonathan Kauffman
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