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I was in a hurry to make bread over the weekend, but my barm was on a different schedule, so I decided to make a commercially-yeasted bread — which I have not done in months.

My favorite recipe for yeasted sandwich bread is Joe Ortiz’ Pain sur Poolish, which is a baguette recipe. The year I learned to make bread, I made this recipe every 2 days for about 4 months.

Since that time, I’ve done a lot of baking, and a lot of reading about baking, and so I’ve modified Joe’s recipe somewhat. Using Peter Reinhart’s principles, I cut the yeast in the poolish drastically, to use barely a pinch, and I extend the fermentation time from 6 hours to ~18. This gives the enzymes plenty of time to unlock the starch molecules in the flour.

The dough in this recipe is extremely wet — nearly ciabatta-like. Shaping loaves requires lots of extra flour, and the result will still be a lumpy mess.

I baked these off directly on a hot stone, and the results were astounding. The loaves were too floppy to gash in any traditional sense, but still they sprung dramatically, to about twice their original size. The crumb was somewhat miraculous: open and airy and chewy, with the sort of flavor you can only get by letting wet flour sit at room temperature for 24 hours before baking. I pulled them from the oven too early, so the crust did not stay crisp, but overall this was an exciting development.

Lou Preston once told me that his wild-yeasted doughs are mixed to 72% hydration. At the time I concluded that I could never approach that level without also having an Alan Scott oven — home ovens do not get hot enough (I believed) to make such wet dough spring sufficiently before the crust gelatinizes — but perhaps this experiment is an indication that my conclusion was premature. More experimenting is warranted, in any case.