profile

The Perfect Loaf 🍞

🍞 My spring baking reset!

Published about 2 months agoΒ β€’Β 2 min read

My spring baking reset

If your baking has felt heavy and slow all winter, this is your reset.

Three recipes this week, all built for speed and simplicityβ€”but also recipes I find myself drawn to in the spring (apricots, herbs!).

My pain de mie is sandwich bread that quietly outperforms everything else in your bread box. Soft, fine-crumbed, and engineered for slicing.

The sourdough discard lemon cake that leans into spring without trying too hard, IMO. It's bright, tender, and a perfect way to burn through that jar of discard on your counter.

And finally, challah. Not because it's a holiday, not because it's Friday, but because a golden, pillowy loaf of challah is just really that good πŸ™‚

Read on!

In this week's newsletter:

  • Recipes: Pain de mie, discard lemon loaf, green olive and herb loaf, apricot and thyme loaf, challah
  • Baking Help: Why does my dough tear during bulk fermentation?
  • Sourdough Links: A remote bakery in Sweden (with incredible pastry)

🍞 Pain De Mie (Sandwich Bread)

This is the sandwich bread that trumps every other sandwich bread in your kitchen. It toasts with a shatteringly crisp edge, and with good French butter and jam, it barely needs anything else.

Fair warning: once you bake your first loaf, this becomes a weekly routine.

πŸ‹ Tangy Lemon Poppyseed Discard Loaf

Something about spring makes me reach for lemon. Can't explain it and won't try to.

This really easy loaf delivers: bright citrus flavor, simple mix, and the kind of tender crumb that disappears faster than you'd expect.

🍞 Green Olive and Herb Sourdough

Don't sleep on this one. Buttery green olives and herbes de Provence give it a savory depth that punches well above a standard rustic loaf.

The crust bakes out thin and cracker-crisp, packed with flavor, and a dusting of wheat germ adds a textural layer that ties the whole thing together.

🍞 Apricot and Thyme Sourdough

I'm calling this one early, but dried apricots and thyme belong together. The combination is quietly sophisticated in a way that reveals itself slice by slice.

Toast it, spread some goat cheese on top, and you'll understand.

🍞 Sourdough Challah

If you haven't tried sourdough challah yet, now's the time! Light, gently sweet, beautifully enriched.

And the next morning? It makes French toast that borders on unreasonable.

Join The Baker's Corner

Come chat bread, get baking perks (like my tools for making formulas, videos, and more), and join the community ✨

πŸ’¬ Member Discussion of the Week

Today, while stretching and folding a Sourdough, the dough almost turned as I stretched it. Any ideas about what makes the dough tear?

That means the dough was strong enough and didn't need more stretches and folds. If the dough feels that strong, skip any remaining sets and let it rest in bulk fermentation! Here's a little more about stretching and folding in bulk.

πŸ›Ÿ 2 Ways I Can Help You Today

πŸ“™ What I'm Reading and Listening To

Happy baking!

​Join me in the member's community, master sourdough, and get baker's perks.

Thank you for subscribing 🩢. Sent from Maurizio at The Perfect Loaf, 8100 Wyoming Blvd NE Ste M4, #343, Albuquerque, NM 87113.
​Unsubscribe Β· Preferences​

The Perfect Loaf 🍞

Maurizio Leo

Want to make bakery-quality sourdough bread from home? Subscribe for the best sourdough guides and recipes to take your bread from ordinary to incredible.

Read more from The Perfect Loaf 🍞

An ode to ciambella (and a few other things) This past weekend, I made my sourdough discard Italian lemon cake: ciambella. It's a fiercely lemon-y cake that's beautifully golden, a little thick like pound cake, and, with the added sourdough starter, just a very (very!) subtle hint of sourness that really plays nicely with the lemon. Check out this incredibly not glitzy, fancy, or staged photo of the golden cake: And that's kind of the point with this one. It's a back-pocket recipe you can...

6 days agoΒ β€’Β 2 min read

Adjusting sourness in your loaf I've been baking sourdough bread for a long while, and for most of that time, I was adjusting the sourness of my bread instinctively without fully understanding why certain things worked. Now I've put it all together in one guide. It covers the science (accessible, I promise), the practical levers you can pull at every stage, and the approach I use in my own kitchen to get exactly the flavor I'm after. If you've ever wished your bread were more or less sour,...

13 days agoΒ β€’Β 2 min read

Sourdough Hot Cross Buns Ever since I developed a Hot Cross Bun (or HxB, for the cool kids) recipe for my cookbook, I've made these each year around this time. Now, HxBs are certainly not something I grew up eating out here, but once you have one of these soft, sweet, and gently spiced rolls with a thick slather of salted butterβ€”well, you can't stop thinking about them. I've taken my cookbook recipe and adapted it for even more softness and a touch more tenderness. If you loved those buns,...

20 days agoΒ β€’Β 3 min read