This is the first recipe in Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day (page 46), and my first adventure in fancy bread. Artisanal bread recipes are intensive, for sure, but the process is pretty simple. There are many tiny instructions, but I think with practice all that stuff becomes second nature. It’s more about timing, and having the patience to leave your dough overnight for fermenting purposes. I plan to do this particular recipe a couple of times so that I can get it right before I move on to the next one. This post is epically long, and for that I apologise. But good bread comes out of it so it’s worth the time it takes to read.
DAY ONE:
Mixing Ingredients
Combine, in a mixing bowl or in the bowl of your mixer, 5 1/3 cups unbleached bread flour, 2 teaspoons table salt or 1 tablespoon kosher salt, 2 teaspoons instant yeast, and 2 1/4 cups lukewarm water. Kosher salt doesn’t have any anti-clumping agents in it, so it is quite different in consistency and size from table salt or even sea salt. Also, Mr. Reinhart recommends using instant yeast because then you get the fermenting action started right away.
Stir or mix on the lowest speed setting for 2 minutes or until well-blended. I found that it all sort of clumped around my paddle and I had to remove it and start again before it took over the world. 
The dough should be, as Mr. Reinhart says, “very soft, sticky, coarse, and shaggy, but still doughlike.” Whatever that means.
Use a wet spatula to scrape the dough into a clean, lightly oiled bowl. Let it rest there for 5 minutes. It should be soft enough to spread out over the bottom of the bowl. Mine, of course, didn’t. I think the wrangling with the paddle in the mixer made it a bit tougher.
Stretching and Folding Dough
Once the five minutes is up you get to do some more fun wrangling. Put your dough on a slightly oiled surface. With wet or slightly oiled fingers, grab the front edge, stretch it out, and fold it over top of the rest of the dough. Now grab the back edge and do the same, then again with both sides. Finally, flip the dough over and bundle it into a ball. Put it back in the lightly oiled bowl and cover it with plastic wrap for ten minutes.
Repeat this stretching step three more times, every ten minutes. You should get all your stretching out within forty to forty-five minutes.
Using my tripod I’ve taken pictures of most of the whole process, just to show you the mechanics of the whole thing and also the changing texture of the dough as it gets stretched. The way Mr. Reinhart puts it, it’s like you’re aligning the gluten molecules through stretching, in the same way that iron atoms align along their poles when a magnet is created.
Excuse my scary scarred and disfigured hands. They’re really not that weird-looking in real life – my hands are just not very photogenic. Also, that stuff? On my pants? It’s paint. I swear. Those are my painting pants. What, it’s a Saturday. I’m allowed to be lax in my dress. You should be glad you didn’t see my bedhead.
Mouse over the photos to see where we are in the stretching process. Below is the second round of stretching.
You can see that the dough is already smoother than it was to begin with. On to the third stretching round.
After the third rest you can see that it’s already significantly larger than it used to be. I also felt some bubbles in the dough that indicated the fermentation process had already begun. I hoped that popping them in the course of my machinations wasn’t to the bread’s detriment.
Fermenting Overnight
After the final stretch I tucked the dough into a ball and put it in a larger, lightly oiled bowl.
Immediately cover the bowl with plastic wrap (to keep in the moisture) and chuck it in the refrigerator to ferment overnight or up to 4 days.
If you are planning on making loaves over the course of many days, this would be the point at which you could separate your dough into separate bowls for separate fermentation. I’m doing it all at once so it all goes in at once.
DAY TWO:
Take your dough out of the fridge at least two hours before you want to bake. Holy smokes look how HUGE my ball is! And check out that MASSIVE bubble on the top.
It was sad to pop it, but the most gorgeous yeasty smell came out when I did so it was totally worth it.
Shaping Bread
This recipe makes 2 large loaves, 4-6 smaller loaves, or 24 rolls. I’ve decided to make two of the three, see what comes out the best. Don’t want to get over-ambitious here.
So I divided my dough in half. One half will become a round loaf called a boule (‘ball’). The other half will become 2 baguette-style torpedoes (or bâtards, haha, bâtards).
I used a sharp serrated knife to divide the dough, but you can use a pastry scraper as well. Make sure if you use a knife you let the serrated edges of the knife do all the work, and avoid pressing down into the dough.
The trick to getting a crusty loaf is in maintaining the surface tension, so you want to pinch the bubbles you see on the surface to pop them, and be gentle in your stretching.
To make the boule:
This is pretty easy, and it’s something you’ve done several times before when you were in the stretching process.
Prepare a bowl or proofing basket. I don’t have the basket so I took a bowl and lined it with a linen couche or proofing cloth. For me, this is an old linen tablecloth that became too stained for company, torn into sections. Spray the cloth in the bowl with oil and dust it with flour.
Gently pat the dough into a rectangle.
Gather the corners underneath and pinch together, stretching out the surface of the boule.
Place the boule, seam-side-down, in your bowl, mist it with spray oil and cover with the edge of the couche. You can see how my seam is already coming undone. Tsk.
To make the bâtard:
Prepare a pan by lining it with parchment paper and dusting it with corn meal or semolina.
Pat the dough into a rectangle, popping the bubbles as you go.
Using the edge of your hand, press a little furrow into the middle of the dough, running along its length.
Roll the front end of the dough over the top of itself until it’s all rolled up.
Pinch the seam shut.
Rock the dough back and forth, seam-side-down, until the dough has reached a desired length, probably between 6 and 12 inches.
Set the dough, seam-side-down, on your prepared pan. Mist them with spray oil and cover with a couche. 
I need some serious practice. Look how lumpy and deformed they are. Tsk again.
Proofing
Proofing is a rest period in the fermentation process. Once the bread is shaped, you let it sit, covered, at room temperature for an hour.
Uncover it and let it proof for a further hour. Uncovering it will let the top of the dough dry out a bit and firm up.
Setting up the Oven
The Pie and I received a pizza stone as an engagement present (thanks KB!) in the summer of 2008 (holy smokes has it really been that long?), and we had yet to use it. While the round shape of the pizza stone is not ideal for baking bread (Mr. Reinhart recommends an oblong shape), it’s the same consistency and will do the same job, which is giving a consistent heat without over-drying the bread. It’s like bread magic. You can of course do this with a sheet pan or cookie sheet instead, lined with parchment paper or sprinkled with semolina or corn meal. I already own the stone, so I might as well use it.
About 45 minutes before you start to bake, you want to prepare your oven for hearth baking. If you’re using a stone, place it on the centre rack and preheat the oven to 550°F or as hot as you can get it without turning on the broiler element.
The key to that lovely crackly crust is steam, believe it or not. On the rack under the heating stone place a pan, like a rimmed cookie sheet, to be filled with water when everything gets hot.
Scoring
Just before baking, take your boule out of the proofing bowl and lay it on a clean surface, seam-side down.
Using a razor blade, score a cross-wise slash into the dough, which will allow some of the moisture to escape while baking and maintain surface tension.
On your bâtards, cut diagonal slashes the length of the bread.
Baking
Ease your loaves onto your hot baking stone (use a peel if you’ve got one). If you aren’t using a baking stone, put your prepared pan straight in the oven. I am pretty certain I overloaded my baking stone here, but I am not a patient enough person to wait and do it in two batches. It’ll just bake all stuck together and I’m cool with that.
Very carefully pour one cup of water into the steam pan. Use long gloves and wear long sleeves as you do this to prevent injury. The Pie took this photo as I had my face averted and my whole body as far away from the heat as possible. 
Reduce oven temperature to 450°F.
Bake for 10-12 minutes, then rotate the pan and bake for a further 10-12 minutes. I found it easier to just rotate the bread, and I took the opportunity to break apart my breads, which were, in fact baking into one large lump as predicted. I think I saved them from looking too demented.
You can get a crispier crust by turning off the oven and leaving your bread in for another 5-10 minutes. Smaller bread shapes will take less time, of course.
Storing Dough
Cool your bread on a rack for at least an hour before cutting and eating. It’s a hardship, I know, after all that time you’ve waited. But it gets the crust all good. I promise. Or you could break the rules and eat some while it’s still warm. We did. Mmmmmm.
Wrap any uneaten baked bread tightly in plastic wrap and it will keep for a couple days.
I found myself constantly comparing it to the knowledge I had of French bread, and so I had to constantly remind myself that this isn’t French bread. The dough is much wetter and the bubbles are much smaller.
When the Pie took his first bite and looked at me I knew he loved me a little bit more, the bread was that good.
Mr. Reinhart says that the unbaked dough will keep in the fridge for up to a week, but that the flavour of the dough deteriorates after four days. He suggests that if you want to keep some dough for later you can seal it in a lightly oiled freezer bag and freeze it after the initial overnight fermentation. Thaw it in the refrigerator the day before you need it so it can thaw slowly without over-fermenting. He also says that the dough makes excellent pizza dough.
Ali Does It Herself 