Baking in general is a technical skill, and a lot of the time involves using a bunch of words that just mean “mixing” or “wet”. As a home baker, these are the words I kept hearing, using but (a) didn’t fully understand or (b) just used because I wanted to sound cool.
Here’s a dictionary to help you understand these terms.
This is an ever growing list of unhinged definitions. Stay tuned for more as I continue this journey.
Sourdough Microbaker: A home cook who decides after consuming lots of social media that they are a trained baker prepared for any culinary challenge only to find out most of the time, they just have a penchant for self sabotage.
Starter (Mother Barloaf): The start of this hellish journey. Also what you call the mixture of flour and water. Because it starts your bread. (Get it?) ((I didn’t at first so no shame)).
Levain: Fancy mother. Mixture of your original starter, which has been ratio fed and will be used in the moment for baking the loaves of bread.
Discard: Literally what it sounds like. If you discard starter, you are throwing away mother. If you discard levain, you are throwing away fancy mother.
Autolyse: Mixing flour and water together and leaving it alone. You’re not going to want to leave it alone, but just leave it be.
Stretch & Fold: Stretching the dough over itself on each side until you can remind yourself you do indeed feel something.
Coil & Fold: Lifting the dough and dropping it on itself very gently. I like to call this “gentle parenting”.
Bulk Fermentation (BF): Waiting for the dough to rise. For a really long time. Like up to five or six hours depending on the temperature. Start your retirement plans maybe?
Proofing: After bulk fermentation, you get the joy of waiting even longer as your dough goes to sleep in the fridge. This is the step where it will all come together, or you’ll decide you’re great at making sourdough soup.
Overproofed: Generally has lost it’s shape, very liquid and not retaining any structure. (Bake it anyway, turn it into croutons).
Underproofed: Very dense and tight, generally a result of rushing the fermentation process.
Crumb: The inside of the bread. What everyone on the internet who cuts the middle of the bread is looking at. What you are looking at. And the only person not looking is the person shoving the whole loaf in their face.
Open Crumb: Big, airy holes woven through the bread. If it looks like the underground tube system in England, congrats, please apply for an engineering degree.
Gummy Crumb: Could take up to 10 years to chew through. Wet, sticky, glue like, undercooked.
Hydration: The amount of water in your dough. The higher the hydration, the harder it is to work with the dough.
Oven Spring: How high the bread is going to rise, also known as “The Moment” in our home.
Scoring: Cutting the dough before baking so it can expand. It apparently can also mean taking a blade and creating art envious of the works of Van Gogh himself on dough.
Ear: The top of the bread that sticks out, and incidentally the thing Van Gogh cut off.
Steam: The vapor of water turning into air, aka me throwing in an ice cube like a grenade into my oven and hoping my bread expands properly.
Shaping: I don’t know how to define this other than making the dough into a shape. Which is what shaping is. A pre-shape is the shape before you perfect the final shape. I know this sounds made up, it’s really not.
Tension: Dragging the dough across a surface to create a tight pulled ball. Also what you feel during most of the waiting process.
Bench Rest: Leaving the dough alone to relax after it spent like 6 hours relaxing.
Lamination: Stretching the dough out to fold it and roll it – this is what helps create layers. This is also when you probably forgot to flour your surface so your dough got stuck to everything. (This oddly specific example is clearly from experience).
Gravity & Grain 