Elephants in our campsite as promised to share. We had a lovely holiday. Driving back tomorrow. @Henry Hunter @Sandy Chong

Look, fire. That’s all the words I have for it. I’m so excited.

Good morning. As we are camping for the next few weeks I was wondering if anybody has a good recipe for a yeasted bread with poolish. Preferable a wetter dough. I do have one that I just made up myself but thought maybe one of you clever people have one. It can be one that gets baked in a tin or just a freestanding artisan type bread.

Most of the time when someone joins the Academy, we ask them to introduce themselves. But I realized something. Even those of us who’ve been here for months spend most of our time talking about the loaf in front of us. Fermentation. Starter problems. Shaping. Why something went flat. What we’re baking Saturday. We rub shoulders every day, but we don’t always get a chance to go one level deeper. So let’s change that today. Whether you’ve been here since day one or joined yesterday, tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from? How did you find us? How did you start baking? What does baking mean to you? What are you hoping to learn or become better at? And what’s something about you we’d probably never know from talking about bread? Take your time. This isn’t a roll call. I want us to know the people we’re baking beside. I’ll start. A lot of you know me as the guy who talks about bread every day. Fewer of you know that my own story with bread started almost by accident, in a small bakery underneath my apartment in Germany more than 40 years ago. And it all really began with four words: “Henry, go wash your hands.” I wrote the rest of that story here: https://henry-hunter-bread-story.lovable.app/ Now it’s your turn. Henry⭐️🔥

This is the loaf that tears like pages of a book. No slicing. You just pull, and it gives you a whole sheet of soft bread with filling in every layer. Here's the part I like best. One dough, and YOU pick the filling: 🍂 Cinnamon brown sugar (the default, every pantry has it) 🥥 Coconut, the classic bakery version 🌰 Almond, pistachio, pecan, or chocolate 🧄 Or go savory with garlic butter and cheddar Same dough. Same shape. Seven different loaves in the photo thread. That's the fun. The skill we're learning is the hinge cut. You flatten the filled log, slice it lengthwise, but stop one inch short of the end so the halves stay connected. Stack, cut again, fold it like an accordion, and stand the layers upright in the pan. That one move turns a plain swirl loaf into something that looks like it came out of a bakery case. Full recipe, with the filling template and every variation, will be in the Pantry Tomorrow: Drop your filling pick in the comments so I know what's coming. And if you cut all the way through the log on your first try, welcome to the club. It bakes fine anyway, and the recipe shows you the fix. Henry⭐🔥