Made this one right after the runaway poolish.😥 Twelve hours from a tiny pinch of yeast, flour, and water to this. Bubbly, webby, climbing the sides, just starting to fall in the middle. That collapse is the signal. 🚶In this short video I walk through how to read a poolish at peak. The dome and dip on top. The bubbles all the way through. The smell, sweet and slightly tangy, almost like fresh beer. The texture and how to handle it without losing half of it on your hands. 👀Watch this before you mix your final dough this week. If yours doesn’t look like this yet, give it more time. If it already collapsed flat and smells boozy, you can still use it, but knock the yeast back a little next time. 💦This is one of those skills that separates bakers who watch the clock from bakers who read the dough. Henry ⭐🔥

Look at how far we've come. We've learned to watch the dough, not the clock. We've worked on shaping and scoring. We've handled wet dough and figured out how to manage it without panicking. We've built our first preferments and seen what a poolish can do. Now we're going to take everything you've learned and build on it. This week we're baking the pretzel loaf. Two tracks. Same loaf. Yeasted with a poolish if you don't have an active starter, or sourdough if you do. Same hydration, same flour weight, same bath, same bake. Just two different ways to get the dough started. Here's what we're adding to your toolkit this week. The alkaline bath. Most home bakers have never used one. It's the step that turns a regular loaf into a pretzel loaf. Three things happen in that bath, and once you understand the why, you'll never look at a pretzel the same way again. Scoring an alkalized crust. The bath seals the surface tight, which means your score has to do real work. We'll get into where to place it and how deep to go. Reading the bake. The five-minute butter rule. What success looks like when you cut into the crumb. The three most common mistakes and how to fix them before they happen. Here's the thing about doing this together that you can't replicate baking alone in your kitchen. When you bake on your own, you only see your loaf. You don't know if your bulk fermentation went too long or too short until you've cut into it. You don't know what underproofed looks like at hour four versus hour six. You don't know if your bath was strong enough until the loaf comes out pale and you're not sure why. In a bake-along, you're seeing dozens of doughs at every stage at the same time. Someone's hours ahead of you. Someone's hours behind. Someone's about to make the same mistake you almost made yesterday, and you can warn them. Someone else figured something out you didn't, and now you know it too. You get exposed to bread you might never have tried on your own. The pretzel loaf is a perfect example. How many of you would've boiled a bread dough in alkaline water if you weren't doing it as a community? Probably not many. But you'll do it this Saturday, and your kitchen's going to smell like something it's never smelled before.

Ever baked something that looked like a pretzel… but didn’t taste like one? That’s the crust. That deep color and flavor don’t come from the oven alone. They’re built before the bake. Once you see that, the whole process makes more sense. This is one of those details that changes the result completely.