A bread-making course covering hydration, gluten, kneading, proving, sourdough, enriched doughs, scoring and shaping. Built on the master doughs in the bread-pasta section.
Bread is four ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast) and an understanding of what happens to them over time. A loaf comes out well when you give the dough the conditions it wants at each stage: enough hydration to form gluten, enough kneading to develop it, enough time to ferment, enough heat to set the crumb. None of these steps is hard on its own. The trick is knowing which lever to pull when things go wrong, which is what the rest of this course teaches.
A lean dough is just flour, water, salt and yeast. An enriched dough adds some combination of butter, eggs, milk, sugar and sometimes extras like dried fruit, citrus zest or chocolate. The result is a softer, richer, sweeter bread (brioche, challah, hot cross buns, panettone). The trade is a slower rise (sugar and fat both inhibit yeast) and a more demanding bake (sugar burns).
Gluten is the protein scaffold that holds a loaf of bread together. Without it, dough is just wet flour. Develop it well and the dough becomes elastic, stretchy and strong enough to trap the gas the yeast produces. Develop it poorly and the gas escapes, the rise collapses and you end up with a flat, dense loaf.
Hydration is the weight of water in a dough expressed as a percentage of the weight of flour. A dough made with 350 g flour and 245 g water is 70% hydration. A baguette dough at 75% is wetter and harder to handle than a sandwich loaf at 60%. The hydration you choose shapes the finished crumb: low hydration gives a tight, sliceable, sandwich-style crumb; high hydration gives the airy, irregular holes of a ciabatta or sourdough.
After kneading, the dough has the gluten scaffold. It does not yet have flavour, structure or the gas pockets that make bread bread. Proving (also called fermentation) is what builds those. Yeast eats the sugars in the flour, releases carbon dioxide as a by-product, and the gluten scaffold traps the gas as expanding bubbles. The flour also breaks down enzymatically over time, developing the deeper flavours.
In the first 8-12 minutes of a hot bake, two things happen at once. The dough heats up and the trapped CO2 expands; the crust starts to set as the surface dries. If the gas expands faster than the crust can stretch, the loaf will tear open somewhere. The score gives that tearing a planned location and shape.
Bread shape is not just decorative. The shape determines how the dough proves (rounds rise upward, batards rise outward), how the crust browns (more surface area means more crust), how the loaf eats (slices vs torn pieces) and how the score behaves in the oven. Once you have made a couple of loaves to a single shape, picking up new shapes is just learning new hand movements; the underlying dough is the same.
A sourdough loaf has the same four ingredients as any other bread (flour, water, salt, leaven), but the leaven is different. Instead of a teaspoon of dried yeast, you build it from a wild-yeast starter that you maintain in a jar on your counter. The starter contains its own wild yeasts and lactic-acid bacteria. The yeasts make the dough rise; the bacteria produce the acids that give sourdough its characteristic tang.
The baguette is the long, thin, crusty French loaf with the dramatic ears down its top. It's the shape with the steepest learning curve in the course - the dough has to stay uniform-diameter across 60 cm - but the technique itself is teachable, and once you have the envelope-fold and the rolling motion, every other long-and-thin loaf becomes a variation.
The bloomer is the long flat oval with diagonal slashes across the top that fans out into a wheat-stalk pattern as it bakes. Classic British artisan shape, very forgiving to make, and one of the most rewarding loaves to score: the slashes open up dramatically in the oven and the bread "blooms" through each one.
A braided loaf looks far more involved than it actually is. Once you can roll three even-length dough strands and have the patience to alternate "right over centre, left over centre" a few dozen times, you can produce something genuinely impressive. It's the loaf you'd bring to a dinner party.
The cob is the round dome you picture when you think "loaf of bread." Master this one shape and a surprising amount of the bread repertoire opens up. The Coburg, the cottage, the sourdough boule, even the rustic country round on the cover of every baking book - all of them start with the same hand movement you'll learn here.
The Coburg is a cob with a single, decisive piece of cutlery work: a deep cross slashed across the top before the bake. In the oven those four quarters lift apart and you get a striking blistered crown for the price of one extra step. Same dough, same shaping as a [cob](cob.md), genuinely impressive result.
The cottage loaf is two rounds stacked, joined by a finger-hole pushed straight down through both. It looks like nothing else and originated for a practical reason - small wood-fired ovens couldn't fit a single big loaf, so bakers stacked a smaller one on top of a larger one to make the most of the heat. The shape stuck. It's a charming, instantly-recognisable English loaf and surprisingly easy to make.
Épi means "ear" in French, as in ear of wheat - and that's exactly what this bread looks like. It's a baguette that's been snipped with scissors before baking so the dough folds out into a fan of pull-apart segments. Quite possibly the easiest visual showstopper in the bread course: if you can shape a baguette, you can épi.
Fougasse is Provence's slashed flatbread: dough stretched out into a leaf or ladder shape with deep cuts pulled open into elongated holes. The holes do something clever - they expose so much surface area to the oven heat that the whole loaf becomes mostly crust. Tear-and-dip is the only way to eat it.
The standard loaf is the everyday rectangular sandwich loaf - dough shaped into a soft oval and dropped into a buttered tin to rise. It's the easiest shape in the whole course and the place to start if you've never baked bread before. The tin does most of the work; you just need to put dough in it.
A tin loaf is a rectangular pan loaf with a deep split running down the centre - like the [standard loaf](standard-loaf.md), but with an extra bit of presentation. You can make it two ways: by joining two pieces of dough side-by-side in the tin (they fuse during baking), or by scoring a single round of dough deeply down its length. Both produce that distinctive striped top.