# Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish - Blinkist What’s in it for me? Discover the methods for creating great quality bread at home. There’s nothing quite like cutting into a freshly baked loaf of high-quality bread, smothering it with butter or dipping it in oil, and savoring its complex flavors. And these days, you can get all this without splashing out on a holiday to France. There’s been an explosion of interest in traditional, artisan bread making in recent years, and it’s even possible to create tasty, complex, professional-looking bread from the comfort of your own home. These blinks shine a light on the world of high-quality home baking. They’ll take you through the principles you need to know, explain what equipment you’ll need to get, and gently walk you through the process that lies behind great bread making. Feel free to skip through these blinks if there’s stuff you already know, or if you want to get to the method right away. Blink 1 will introduce the author of Flour Water Salt Yeast, Ken Forkish, and Blinks 2–4 will explain the principles and setup you’ll need to get used to. Then, Blinks 5–7 will  outline the methods for making bread, and for creating your own levain culture – otherwise known as a sourdough starter. Finally, Blinks 8 and 9 will explain how to adapt those methods for making specific types of bread, pizza or focaccia. And, along the way, you’ll find out what the two secret ingredients are in every recipe; why you really shouldn’t be measuring stuff by volume; and how to make a yeast culture that you can maintain for decades. Becoming a baker Almost everyone with a busy business career has dreamed of packing it in and starting over. A new life as a baker sounds particularly idyllic – making artisanal bread, serving your friendly neighborhood community, starting work at 3.30 each morning to tend to your yeast culture… Wait, what? Ken Forkish, the author, is not your average career changer. After 20 years in the tech business, he decided to retrain as a baker, and he now runs Ken’s Artisan Bakery in Portland. But despite having traded in his suit and tie, his new line of work is still seriously hard work. Especially if you’re a perfectionist like Forkish, baking can be super demanding. For a professional bakery, where things need to be ready for the early morning rush, that means some seriously early starts. You’ll be relieved to learn that it’s possible to create great-quality bread at home – to a far more normal-sounding schedule. A little perfectionism still goes a long way, though. The key message here is: After a career change, Ken Forkish became a brilliant baker, thanks to his obsessive, detail-focused drive. Back in 1995, Forkish was working in tech, and had barely baked a loaf in his life. But something about a magazine article he read sparked his imagination. It was about a famous Parisian baker, Lionel Poilâne, who had spurned modern technology and returned to the subtle craft of traditional bread making. Before he knew it, Forkish had joined the Bread Bakers Guild of America and enrolled in a course at the San Francisco Baking Institute. He also studied with numerous other experienced pros, so that he could emulate the greatest and most traditional boulangeries in France. He found his perfect location in Portland, Oregon, a town with a great food scene that he thought would welcome his ambitious, artisanal plans. He was right, and Ken’s Artisan Bakery is still going strong. In fact, it’s now expanded – Forkish runs a pizza place as well. One reason for Forkish’s success is his passionate, even obsessive focus on detail. Thankfully, you don’t have to adopt his punishing schedule to make great bread at home. However, you do need to do a lot more than follow a recipe – you need to understand the principles. And that’s what we’ll look at now. Principles Given the title of Forkish’s book, you might think that there were four basic ingredients to making bread. Well, technically yes, but in fact there are two more elements to consider that don’t need to go on your shopping list. They are time and temperature. Flour, water, salt, yeast, time, and temperature can combine in an infinite variety of ways, to produce an infinitely subtle variety of breads. With experience, you’ll be able to manipulate these elements to get perfectly baked bread that has whatever variations you want in taste and texture. The key message here is: At the heart of good bread making is understanding how the ingredients interact with each other. Let’s start with time and temperature. Anyone who’s used an oven will understand that they have an inverse relationship: the higher the temperature, the less time is needed. It’s true outside the oven, too. If you want a dough mix to develop more quickly, put it in a warmer spot in your kitchen. Or, to really slow things down, put it in the fridge. Flour is a variable in itself. Some recipes use only white flour, which is flour made from just one part of the wheat kernel – the endosperm. But other recipes use a mix of white flour and whole wheat flour, made from the entire kernel. Plus, there are other flours you can use, like rye and spelt. How much water should you add to the flour? Forkish prefers his doughs relatively wet, typically with around three quarters as much water as flour. Wet doughs are harder to form into loaves; however, they lead to more gas production, which results in a lovely, light texture, and a more complex flavor. You should feel free to experiment with different flour mixes, so long as the total amount of flour you use stays constant. Just bear in mind that whole wheat flour is more absorbent than white flour – so it’ll require more water. And then there’s yeast. Different approaches to yeast yield different methods, as you’ll see later on. For now, let’s just note that you can vary the amount of yeast if you vary other elements too – just like anything else. For instance, you can add less yeast to a mix, and then simply give it more time to develop. You’ll get the same result, but with a richer flavor. Equipment Ken’s Artisan Bakery is the proud owner of a 1,200-square-foot open kitchen, an Italian oven weighing 15,000 pounds, a cool room known as the retarder where mixes can ferment at a particular temperature, and all the professional kit he needs. For his pizzas, he has a wood-fired oven that reaches temperatures of more than 1,000°F (538°C). How in the world can you compete with that in your home kitchen? Actually, it’s easier than you’d think, if you get a few key pieces of kit. The key message here is: Your home kitchen can’t replicate a professional one, but with the right kit you can still achieve great quality.  So, what do you need? First off, obviously, an oven, which hopefully you have. Do you have a special oven thermometer, though? Many standard home ovens give inaccurate temperature reads. Inside the oven, Forkish does not recommend a baking tin or stone. At home, a Dutch oven can’t be beaten. Its lid means that the bread can bake in its own steam, rivaling the steam of a professional oven. Specifically, Forkish recommends a four-quart Dutch oven, although five quarts is fine too. For pizza, get a pizza stone. You’ll also need a large, round tub, in which you’ll mix your dough and then let it rise. Get some smaller tubs to hold your levain culture or pre-ferment – terms that will make more sense to you in a minute. It’s great if these tubs can be transparent, so you can monitor your mix’s progress without disturbing it. Also get hold of a proofing basket for the dough’s final rise before it hits the oven. One of nine inches diameter at the top will perfectly match your four-quart Dutch oven. A digital kitchen scale will lead to vastly better results than measuring stuff by volume. That’s because ingredients, especially flour, can have different consistencies: two different brands of flour may have the same volume but differing weights. Oh, and get a probe thermometer. It’s essential for making sure you’re adding water at the right temperature. Don’t forget some oven mitts, too – especially for dealing with that piping hot Dutch oven. You’ll need nice clean tea towels to cover your proofing basket – or, a surprisingly effective hack is to use plastic bags, which are also great for storing stuff in the fridge. Pre-ferments and levain baking Have you been eagerly awaiting that famously trendy term sourdough starter? Well, here we go… sort of. It’s time to talk about yeast. First of all, do remember: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with commercial yeast – in fact, it’s a vital ingredient of most of Forkish’s recipes. But some of the fun in home baking comes from creating your own yeast culture. And for that, all you need is flour, water, and that crucial extra element, time. Sorry to disappoint you, but Forkish doesn’t actually use the term sourdough starter – or even just sourdough. He prefers the French term levain. But make no mistake – he knows his way around a yeast culture. The key message here is: Making levain and pre-fermented cultures is simpler than you’d think, and well worth the effort. You might not realize it, but natural yeast is all around us – in the air, in the soil, on fruit, everywhere. There’s plenty of it in flour, although it needs a bit of coaxing before it does anything. The great thing about natural yeast is that it contains multiple strains. Commercial yeast, by contrast, is a monoculture, which results in a predictable flavor. The way a natural yeast culture develops will be a lot more distinctive and complex. However, using 100 percent natural yeast in a bake is an option mainly for the purists. More commonly, professional bakers – including Forkish – add a small amount of commercial yeast alongside their own levain culture on the day of the bake. Just a little bit of that vigorous commercial culture results in more delicate bread, with greater rise. An intermediary step between basic, single-day bread making and levain baking, is using a pre-ferment. This is a mix of dough you can make one night before baking. It contains a tiny amount of commercial yeast, left to develop slowly overnight, so that it achieves a more complex flavor profile. Forkish recommends two types of pre-ferment. Poolish is a French term that describes a wet mix, typically using equal amounts flour and water. Biga is Italian, and generally uses less water. Both have particular uses: Forkish uses a biga for his bakery’s ciabatta, for instance, while a poolish is common for baguettes. So, how do you actually make a poolish, biga or levain culture for yourself? For more on the method, skip ahead to Blink 7. Right now, though, we’ll take a look at basic bread-making technique. Making bread – the essential method (Part 1) There are infinitely many subtle ways to adapt the breadmaking process by shifting the ratios of flour, water, salt, yeast, time, and temperature – as well as by using different mixes of flour, and developing the yeast in different ways. But there’s a common core to all the methods – not a recipe, so much as a blueprint. And this is it: the outline of the process you should pretty much always follow. Here’s the basic method to use every time you make bread at home. Step 1. Autolysis. You will need: 1kg flour in whatever mix you want – or 800g for a levain bread; About 750g or 600g water – 75 percent the amount of flour – at around 90°F or 32°C. A kilo is enough for two loaves – you’ll halve the mix later on. Use the second half for a second loaf, or some pizzas. Adjust the amount of water as necessary – you may need more if you’re using mostly whole wheat flour, or less if you’re just using white flour. Combine the flour and warm water together in your big tub. Mix together with one sticky hand. Then, put a lid on, and leave it alone for 20 to 30 minutes or so. This is the autolysis stage – autolyse the dough mix so that the flour properly absorbs the water. Don’t autolyse if you’re using a poolish or biga that contains most of the recipe’s flour. Step 2. Mixing. Now add: 20–22g salt; Dried yeast depending on your method; Your pre-ferment or levain culture, if you’re using one. Without a pre-ferment or levain, add 3–4g yeast, unless you’re going to leave it to ferment overnight – in which case you can use as little as 0.8g. A poolish or biga will need an additional 2–3g yeast at this stage, and you can add around 2g to a levain mix at this stage too. If you’re going down the purist levain path, don’t add any at all. If you’re making levain, add 360g of your culture – that should contain 200g flour, to take you up to the full kilo overall. Dip your hand in a bowl of warm water, stick your hand into the mix, and gradually work to fold everything in. Once it’s folded together, keep mixing, using a pincer technique – grip big pieces with your thumb and forefinger, working through the whole dough until there’s some tension. Cover the tub again, and let it rest and rise. During this resting phase, the mix will ferment. Typically you should give it around five hours. Or if you add less yeast, you can give it longer – even leave it overnight. But, as you’ll see in the next step, you will need to interrupt the dough’s progress a couple times. Making bread – the essential method (Part 2) Step 3. Folding. Several times while the dough is resting, give it some extra strength by folding it. Like before, reach your hand in and fold the mix over on itself. Then invert it so it’s shaped like a ball. You might need to do this just twice, or a few more times with wetter doughs. Try to do all the folds during the first couple of hours of the rise. Step 4. Preparing it to proof. Wait until the dough has risen. Then, flour a work surface as well as your own hands, and very gently take the dough out of the tub. If you’ve started with a kilo of flour, cut it in two, taking care to tear as little gluten as possible. Form each piece into a ball, and delicately place it into a well floured proofing bowl. Cover with a kitchen towel. Let it proof. If you’re using instant yeast, a typical proof time is around an hour or a little longer. Or you can let it proof overnight in the refrigerator – increasing the time and decreasing the temperature. Pure levain mixes need longer to proof at room temperature – in the region of four hours. How can you tell when it’s ready? Poke it with your finger. The dough should spring back – but only slowly, and not all the way. Step 5. Baking. Some time before the dough is ready, preheat not just the oven but the Dutch oven too, to 475°F or 245°C. When the time comes, remove the Dutch oven – wearing gloves – and slide the proofed dough into it, taking care to maintain the rounded shape it’s developed in the basket. Bake with the lid on for around 30 minutes, then take the lid off and continue baking for however long it needs. That’ll be some 20 minutes or a little longer. Be sure to check regularly to make sure it doesn’t go beyond the sweet spot. Forkish aims for a loaf that’s a dark shade of brown – just the right side of burned. Step 6. Rest. Not you! The bread. Once it’s out of the oven, give it at least 20 minutes before slicing it. The inside will still be baking. Don’t just set it down on a flat surface – keep it on a rack, or at least on its side, so that it’s surrounded by air. Making a levain culture Making a levain culture might sound like a lot of work, and there’s no denying that it requires care and attention, strung out over multiple days. But once you get into the routine, it’s a process that’s nice and simple to keep going, with minimal effort required each day. Plus, you can think of it as an investment for great bread stretching way into the future. Forkish’s levain culture dates all the way back to 1999. Here’s how to create your very own levain culture from scratch. Day 1 Mix equal weights of flour and warm water – say 500g of both – in a small tub, and mix it by hand. Leave it uncovered for a couple hours. Then cover it, and leave it somewhere fairly warm. You can use any sort of flour, if you want to – Forkish’s own culture started life as whole rye flour. Do this in the morning, and take the rest of the day off. Or, you know, go to work or whatever. Day 2 The next morning, get rid of three-quarters of the mix. To the remainder, add the same amount of flour and water as you started with yesterday. Mix it, and once again leave it uncovered for a while before covering. Day 3 The mix should have doubled in volume, and it should start to smell alcoholic, too. Do exactly what you did on Day 2, including chucking three-quarters of it out. Day 4 It should have expanded again, just like yesterday. This time, throw away even more, until there’s just a couple hundred of grams left. Then, add the same amount of flour and water as on previous days, cover it, and let it rest. Day 5 In the morning, do the same as on Day 4, but this time keep a little bit less again. Then add the same amount of flour as ever, but make sure it’s a mix of white and whole wheat flour at the ratio 4:1. Add a little less water than usual, at a slightly lower temperature. Mix, cover, and rest. It’ll be ready to use by the afternoon. Get baking! Day 6, until the end of time If you want, you can stop there, but now you have a mature levain culture, you can go on maintaining it every day, taking a bit out of it for use in baking whenever you want. From now on, use the same amount of flour and water as on Day 5, and slightly less again of your levain culture. If you want to pause things for a while, you can store your culture in the refrigerator for up to a month or so. The different types of bread There’s a scientific aspect to baking, especially for an obsessive like Forkish. But it’s never just a numbers game. In other words, while you do have to stick to the correct ratios of ingredients, and the methods outlined above, baking also gives you the chance to indulge your creativity and find your own signature style. In this overview, you’ll see how to flesh out the basic method and make a loaf your own. Here’s a summary of the different types of bread you can make. Straight doughs with commercial yeast. This is a great option if you have just one day to play with. You can start at 9.30 in the morning and have a loaf ready around 5 p.m. A loaf like this will need around five hours to rest, and just over an hour to proof. One great variation is adding less yeast, and letting it rise in the refrigerator overnight. You can also experiment with the amount of whole wheat flour you use – even up to 75 percent. Pre-ferments. A poolish or biga will need up to 14 hours to ferment, before you can add it to the rest of your dough, so it’s not hard to manage if you have some time the previous evening. These pre-ferments typically use at least half of the total flour. For a white-bread poolish, you’d add the same amount of water plus a small amount of instant yeast. The next day, add that mix to salt, the rest of the flour, and more water and yeast, and give it another couple hours of fermentation time and about an hour to proof. If you start that poolish in the early evening, you can have it out of the oven in time for lunch the next day. Levains mixed with commercial yeast. Forkish’s preferred method for this sort of bread is to let it proof in the refrigerator overnight, so you’ll need to begin work a day ahead of schedule. After the morning feeding of the levain, it’ll be ready to use mid-afternoon. Add the levain mix to your preferred blend of flour, water, salt, and more yeast, and give it some five hours to rise. That evening, divide it and put your loaf in the proofing basket – and put that in the refrigerator. You can bake the following morning. Forkish’s variations on this method include a loaf containing caramelized walnuts, and another encrusted in bran. Get creative! Pure levains. A pure levain mix requires a similar method, although without the commercial yeast, there’s no need to use the refrigerator this time. You can leave your mix to ferment overnight, proof it for around four hours the next day, and then you’ll be ready to bake. Forkish makes a pain au bacon using this method, with sautéed bacon added to the mix. Making pizza and focaccia It’s possible that you’ve committed to using a whole kilo of flour, but will struggle to get through the two entire loaves that’ll produce. But don’t panic – you can use the dough to make other stuff, too. And not just any other stuff – stuff as delicious as pizza and focaccia. So let’s take a look at the method needed for that. Of course, you can also make up batches of dough specifically for pizza or focaccia. How to make pizza Generally speaking, you can use the same dough mixes you would for a loaf, for pizza. And the method starts the same way, too. Once you’ve divided the dough, you’ll need around 350g per pizza. Form the dough into a ball. The dough ball should then proof for up to an hour, and it’s a good idea to then chill it in the refrigerator, because cooler dough is easier to shape into a pizza base. Shape it by patting it down on a well-floured surface, and then using your fists to stretch the dough out – but only gently. For a classic Italian-style pizza, you’ll want the dough pretty thin. If you’re feeling brave, then work on developing your pizza toss – it’s not just for show, but helps to produce an even thinness across the whole base. Then it’s topping time. Get the best quality tinned tomatoes you can – Forkish’s pick is San Marzano from Italy – and don’t skimp on quality mozzarella and basil. But of course, you can let your imagination run wild at this point. As for the oven – get it as hot as you possibly can. It might be worth experimenting with the broiler setting to reach especially high temperatures, though of course take care. All in all, the pizza should need less than ten minutes in the oven. How to make focaccia Focaccia is perhaps a broader concept than pizza. On average it’s probably thicker, and its toppings are more varied, not necessarily including tomato or cheese. Forkish makes his focaccia in a cast-iron skillet or on a sheet pan, both of which can accommodate more thickness than a pizza stone. The method is essentially as for pizza, but of course you’ll be shaping the dough for the skillet or pan rather than stretching it. The oven doesn’t need to be as scorching for focaccia as it does for pizza. Really use your imagination for the toppings. Forkish’s ideas range from simply olive oil and salt, to zucchini with pepper and chili flakes, to caramelized onions, olives and anchovies. Final summary The key message in these blinks: After switching from his tech career, Ken Forkish became a highly skilled professional baker thanks to his dedication and keen eye for detail. It’s possible to excel at baking even without a professional kitchen, if you get the right equipment and work to understand not just the specifics of a breadmaking recipe, but the principles that underpin the process. Actionable advice:  Kit out your kitchen, and get baking. The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have the right equipment. Don’t underestimate the importance of the Dutch oven to this method – baking your bread inside one of these is crucial for getting the sort of quality that Forkish is all about. Once you’re fully kitted out, you can get down to it – but don’t forget to properly absorb the method first. Got feedback? We’d love to hear what you think about our content! Just drop an email to remember@blinkist.com with Flour Water Yeast Salt as the subject line and share your thoughts! What to read next: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, by Samin Nosrat In Flour Water Salt Yeast, Ken Forkish introduces you to the key principles that lie behind his brand of artisanal baking, cleverly adapted to work for you at home. Similarly, Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is not your traditional cookbook. Instead, it’s an introduction to some of the principles underlying great cooking – explaining how the four crucial elements in the title interact and contribute to achieving quality taste. To further your understanding of cookery principles, we recommend the blinks to Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.