The 70-2-1 Bread Doctrine
Baking under a rules-based order
I have been baking my own bread in 2025. I enjoy the challenge. I like to fail. Baking is risky, just like life. Sometimes when things don’t work out, I eat more rice and potatoes for a day or two. This is good practice for the myriad of other ways that life can trip me up.
My interest in baking my own bread was rekindled by Graison Gill, who founded the Bellegarde Bakery in New Orleans. He writes a Substack.
Mr. Gill is a passionate wheat geek, the only one I know. He dives as deeply into wheat cultivation as Heather Cox Richardson dives into US political history. He’s the only person I have read who sanely connects white flour to white supremacy, but I digress. If you like food policy, he is worth a read.
I did not adopt my bread doctrine from Mr. Gill, though if you review the baguette recipe he has in the Substack you will find it resonant. Here is my doctrine:
Four ingredients - flour, water, salt, and yeast.
Measure by weight - 100% flour, 70% water, 2% salt, and 1% yeast.
Bake at 200 degrees Celsius for 40 minutes.
That’s it. I don’t make bread any other way. This discipline permits me to appreciate the ways the bread is influenced by the specifics of flour and technique.
This is not a recipe. One can’t just mix all this up into a bowl and toss it in the oven to get what one knows as bread, but adherence to this discipline reveals what about the bread I bake that is a consequence of (1) kneading and proofing technique and/or (2) the specific flour mixture I used.
Technique
There are a lot of different ways to make flour, water, salt and yeast into dough. One can, of course, knead by hand and do a bulk rise before shaping. One can use a stand mixer. One can mix everything thoroughly and let it sit over night with no kneading at all.
All of these methods, using the same ratio of ingredients, will produce dough, but the bread will be different. It will rise differently, it will have different textures according to how much and how the gluten is developed.
I use a stretch and fold technique most often for kneading. This involves stretching the dough out to the sides and then folding the right side on to the left. Then, one rotates the dough ninety degrees and does it again; repeating until the dough won’t really stretch any more, usually on the fourth or fifth rotation to fold. I repeat this exercise a few times (usually four). After letting the dough rest and rise to double the volume, I stretch and fold again, repeating four-five times, depending on the feel of the dough.
This is a compromise between hand-kneading all at once, which can take a good forty-five minutes, and the no-knead technique, which means the dough won’t be ready for at least sixteen hours, and then it won’t be bread until a few hours after that. I can’t wait that long for my carbs.
I also don’t have a stand mixer. If I did, I could see what it does. When I was a commercial cook, I only used a standing floor mixer, but I was making twenty-five loaves at a time. That’s different, the skills are different.
Fermentation
When you mix flour, water, and salt with yeast, the yeast begins consuming the sugars in the flour and producing carbon dioxide gas and alcohol as byproducts. This carbon dioxide creates bubbles in the dough, causing it to rise and develop the air pockets in bread. The alcohol reacts with the wheat proteins to contribute to the complex flavors associated with good bread. This is related to lactic acid fermentation for yogurt and kimchi.
Fermentation takes time to produce alcohol, then the alcohol takes time to develop the flavors. The carbon dioxide is what makes the dough rise and have holes in it. The alcohol brings out the flavors in the wheat as it contacts and reacts with the germ and endosperm. This is why white flour produces a less distinctively flavored bread. There is less reactive stuff in white flour.
Carbon dioxide is produced faster than the alcohol, does one thing (creates bubbles) and it does it immediately. If I bake my bread on the same day I make and proof the dough there’s plenty of time to develop the carbon dioxide, but the alcohol has less time to deepen the wheat’s flavor. So, after four to five stretch and fold techniques are done, I put the dough in the fridge overnight. This makes a HUGE difference in how the bread tastes, even with all white flour.
Flour
I bake with primarily four different grades of flour that I mix together in various ratios to produce various effects:
00 (double-ought, very finely milled grain ~ moderate 10-12% protein),
APF (all purpose flour, mid-range protein ~ 11-13% protein),
bread flour (more protein, ~ 13-15%) and
pastry flour (less protein ~ 9-11%)
I use both white and whole wheat (if I can find them) varieties for these four flour formulations. The loaf at the top of this post was half white bread flour and half whole wheat all purpose flour. I like this mix for sandwich bread.
I use 100% 00 flour for pizza dough. Whole wheat 00 is hard to find, so if I want whole wheat dough I’ll mix whole wheat APF (all purpose flour) in with a larger proportion of 00. One has to approach proportions of 50% whole grain flour to 00 before the dough begins to look and taste like whole wheat pizza dough.
I buy my flour from Anson Mills in South Carolina. Actually, I buy all my grains from Anson Mills because they do things right for the right reasons (this is an uncompensated commercial endorsement). They sell specific varieties of all common cooking grains; I am currently fond of Red Fife wheat.
Red Fife is a hard red spring wheat that was the dominant wheat grown in Western Canada at the end of the 19th century. It's named for its reddish color and was originally brought to Canada by David Fife, a farmer in Ontario. It became popular due to its excellent baking qualities and ability to mature within the shorter Canadian growing season.
This wheat has a very nutty flavor. The all purpose milling contains marginally-high protein levels (typically 12-13%), making it good bread flour suitable for bread baking while still being versatile enough all purposes.
Before I enforced The Bread Doctrine I used whatever flour I had on hand. I assumed they were largely interchangeable, which they are. Sometimes I was making recipes like this one for bread, from Anson Mills, which includes two ingredients proscribed by The Bread Doctrine: eggs and milk.
The protein in eggs give bread more structure to the gluten, the fat in both eggs and milk soften the crumb by interfering with gluten development, the carotenoids in the yolks impart a golden color. Bread made with milk browns better because of the lactose, it is also softer because of the fat, it is subtly sweeter, and it stays fresh longer before going stale.
One can argue these are all improvements in bread, but they also mask and confound determining what is going on with changes in the wheat and technique components.
Why not put eggs, milk, nuts, and sugar in your bread dough?
If I was baking commercially I certainly would. If I was baking to please my palate, or someone else’s, I would have to. That’s not why I bake for myself. I’m curious about things that are overlooked and taken for granted, like the contribution that wheat and technique make to the way bread tastes.
This is kind of the whole point I want to make about discipline. Discipline, practiced mindfully, is liberating. If you do something the same way every time you can appreciate the variations in your outcomes that aren’t under your control.
This can apply to a lot of areas of life—work, relationships, parenting, making coffee, washing your car. It can permit you to catch things you might have otherwise overlooked. Particularly when doing something like making bread, which is fraught with multiple opportunities for anomalies, exercising discipline can teach about the limits of your control over the world.
Knowing the limits of your control over the world can comfort you.
Oh, also, one more rule, and perhaps the most important: thou shalt let bread rest for a full hour after coming out of the oven. Yes, it smells great, and most things taste like they smell, but bread isn’t finished becoming bread until it sits at room temperature for about an hour. If you cut into before that, it will be gummy and too moist.
Exercise discipline.