The recipe does not see the dough

Two doughs can be born at the same hour and not be the same age. One has already gained volume: the surface is taut, and under the hand there is a structure able to hold gas. The other is still tight, or it has spread without building enough strength. The clock gives both the same number of minutes; the material says something different.

The temperature of the workshop may have changed. The flour may have taken up the water differently. The sourdough starter may have reached the mixing with more activity, or with less. A few degrees, or a longer interval since the last refreshment, can alter the whole course. The recipe states what has to go into the dough; on its own it cannot say what the dough has become.

Breadmaking still needs precise quantities: flour, water, leaven, temperature and timings cannot be left to the inspiration of the moment, and the idea of the craftsman who works entirely by feel confuses experience with approximation. A baker measures: he weighs the ingredients, records the temperatures, sets the cycles, checks how far the starter has matured and knows the capacity of his own oven. Then he looks at what those numbers have produced.

A formula can set a quantity of water, but it does not guarantee that two flours will take it up in the same way. It can state a resting time, but it does not certify that fermentation has reached the right point. Measurement is necessary because it allows repetition; observation is necessary because the material does not simply obey. The craft does not choose between precision and sensitivity: it forces them to work together.

Flour is already a decision

The word flour seems to name a uniform material. It is not: the wheat variety, the soil, the run of the weather, fertilisation, the ripeness of the grain, storage and milling can all affect its composition and its behaviour during breadmaking. Even two flours belonging to the same commercial type can absorb different amounts of water and respond differently to mixing and to fermentation. Protein content alone does not tell the whole story: what counts is the quality of the proteins that will form the gluten, the enzyme activity, the amount of starch damaged during milling and the presence of fibre and of the bran, the outer layers of the kernel.

For Pane Toscano DOP the product specification narrows this field of variation. The flours allowed are soft wheat flours of type 0, 1 or 2 containing the wheat germ, obtained from varieties grown, stored and milled in Tuscan territory. For type 0 flour the specification sets parameters for strength, for the balance between tenacity and extensibility, for the capacity to absorb water and for enzyme activity; for types 1 and 2 it states minimum requirements for protein and gluten. These are not bureaucratic details: they are there to stop flours unable to sustain the intended process from reaching the oven under the same denomination.

The product specification reduces unpredictability, it does not remove it. A compliant flour can still behave slightly differently from the one used the week before, and the baker has to recognise the difference before it becomes a fault in the bread.

Water does not simply fill the dough

When it meets the flour, water does more than wet it. It hydrates the proteins, allows the gluten structure to form, makes the sugars available and creates the environment in which yeasts, bacteria and enzymes will work. How much is needed depends on the flour and on the result being sought.

Higher hydration can encourage a more extensible dough and a more open crumb. It can also produce a mass that is hard to govern, unable to hold its shape or to retain gas properly if the flour and the process are not suited to it. More water does not automatically mean more quality.

In part of the contemporary conversation about bread, hydration has become a kind of honorific: doughs wetter and wetter, cut faces photographed against the light. But it is not a competition: it is a relationship between the capacity of the flour to take up water and the capacity of the dough to keep it inside a usable structure.

The baker does not decide how much water to add in order to reach the most impressive number to write in a caption. He decides how much that bread can carry.

The starter is not an heirloom

A sourdough starter is often described through its age. Thirty years, fifty, a hundred: a dough handed down like a family object, as though it still physically contained the flour mixed by whoever began it. But a starter is not preserved by standing still: it survives because it is continually transformed.

A part of the previous culture is mixed with fresh flour and fresh water. The microorganisms use the substances available, producing gas, acids and aromatic compounds. Before the resources run out, a new portion is refreshed and the process starts again. What crosses the years is not a material that has stayed intact: it is a continuity of gestures and of selections.

Communities of yeasts and lactic acid bacteria live together in the starter, and their composition depends on the flour used, on the temperature, on the amount of water, on the frequency of the refreshments and on the ratio between the dough kept back and the new food. Changing these conditions for good means favouring some microorganisms and putting others under strain.

An old starter can be managed badly, turn excessively acid, lose fermenting power or produce a profile unsuited to the bread wanted; a younger culture can be perfectly stable, active and under control. The baker does not use the starter because it is old: he uses it when it is ready. He watches its volume, its structure, its smell and the speed of its fermentation, and he knows the moment when the culture has developed enough activity and the moment when it has begun to eat into its own reserves.

A starter is not a pet to be celebrated on social media: it is a microbial culture to be kept in balance. Its age is a biography; the craft is what allows it to continue.

Sciocco does not mean incomplete

Pane Toscano DOP is made without salt. That absence decides its taste, but it does not concern taste alone: in a wheat dough salt can affect the structure, the extensibility, the ability to hold gas and the fermenting activity. Leaving it out means working with a different system from the very beginning.

Salt is not simply forgotten at the end of the recipe. Its absence has to be allowed for in the behaviour of the flour, in the mixing, in the fermentation and in the shaping. This is why calling Tuscan bread only saltless bread is at once correct and insufficient: it describes what is missing, not what the baker has to build so that the absence works.

The product specification uses the word sciocco, saltless, and describes a flavour without salt, slightly sour. It does not speak of a neutral product with no identity: the flour containing the germ, the fermentation with the starter and the baking work together to produce aroma, crust and the texture of the crumb. Sciocco does not mean insignificant. It means that the flavour is not held up by saltiness and that every other component is left more exposed.

An unbalanced acidity cannot be hidden. An insufficient fermentation is not compensated for. A mediocre flour stays recognisable. Removing an ingredient does not necessarily make a recipe simpler: sometimes it narrows the margin behind which mistakes can hide.

Mixing is not stirring

At the start, in the bowl, flour and water form a broken mass. Mixing distributes the ingredients, progressively hydrates the components of the flour and encourages the building of the network able to accompany the expansion of the gas. This structure has to hold apparently opposite qualities: strong enough not to tear under the pressure of the bubbles, extensible enough to let them grow. If it is too weak, the gas escapes or the cells collapse; if it is too stiff, the dough resists expansion.

Movement produces heat as well. Longer or more intense mixing can raise the temperature of the mass: in certain conditions it develops the structure, beyond the useful point it can weaken or overheat it. There is therefore no number of minutes able to replace observation completely.

The baker looks at whether the mass has gathered, how far it clings to the bowl, how it stretches, whether it tears and what temperature it has reached. He can stop, let it rest, fold it or carry on. The mixer applies energy; it does not know when that energy has become enough. The hand is not superior to the machine by natural right: it is responsible for the decision the machine cannot take.

Fermentation produces gas. The dough has to keep it

During fermentation the microorganisms use the substances available in the flour. The yeasts produce most of the carbon dioxide responsible for the increase in volume; the lactic acid bacteria contribute to the acidification and to the formation of compounds that will affect the aroma, the flavour and the behaviour of the dough. But producing gas is not enough: the gas has to be held.

A dough can ferment intensely and still not rise adequately, because its own structure cannot keep the pressure in. It can gain volume quickly and then give way. It can look swollen while inside the walls between the bubbles have already become too fragile. The visible rise is therefore the result of two different capacities, generating gas and containing it, and confusing them leads to misreading the dough.

The baker watches how taut the surface is, how it answers pressure, whether the bubbles are spread out or gathered in a few places, how far the mass has relaxed and what smell it has developed. Time remains important, but it is a variable of the process, not its sole judge.

Inside this phase, the bulk fermentation, sit the folds, which have become one of the most recognisable gestures of contemporary craft breadmaking. The dough is lifted, stretched and folded back on itself, and in photographs the gesture looks soft, almost contemplative. Its function is not aesthetic: a fold can help to strengthen the structure, redistribute the temperature, move nutrients and microorganisms about and reorganise the gas cells inside the mass.

Their number and intensity depend on the type of dough. A weak mass can benefit from reinforcement; one already sufficiently structured can be damaged by excessive handling. Repeating a fold because the recipe says three, without looking at what the first one produced, turns a technique into a ritual. Every gesture must have a reason: when the reason disappears, only the choreography of the craft is left.

An open crumb is not a medal

The cut face of a loaf has become a surface to display. Large holes, thin walls, irregular cavities: the more spectacular the void, the more technically successful the bread appears. But bread is not made to be photographed once. It has to be sliceable, to hold what goes on it, to give a consistent texture and not to lose half the topping through a cavity as wide as the slice.

The crumb structure tells how the gas formed, spread and was kept. On its own it is not a ranking of quality. A loaf can have a tighter crumb and be perfectly fermented; it can hold large cavities because it was shaped badly or because the structure gave way unevenly. Pane Toscano DOP has to show an irregular crumb structure, not win a contest for the biggest hole.

The crumb has to live with the crust, keep, take up oil or sauces and become, when it loses freshness, material for other dishes. A hole is not an internal ornament: it is the visible result of the balance between fermentation and structure.

Shaping means distributing the future

When the dough is divided, every piece already contains gas, tensions and differences of temperature. Shaping does not only make the loaf recognisable: it organises the mass so that it can face the final proof and the expansion in the oven. The baker has to create a surface taut enough to hold the shape without indiscriminately crushing everything fermentation has built. Too little tension can let the loaf spread, too much can tear the surface or make expansion difficult, and a weak seam can open in the wrong place during baking.

Weight changes behaviour too. A small scaling weight does not ferment, heat up and lose water exactly as a larger loaf does: change the mass and you change the ratio between crust and crumb and the speed at which the heat reaches the centre. Reducing the size is therefore not the same as halving the amount of dough. Every scaling weight calls for coherent handling, and the craft has to reach as far as the last loaf, even when dozens of them come out of the same mass.

In 2025 the product specification for Pane Toscano DOP was amended to allow smaller loaves, with weights between 200 and 500 grams. The official reasoning did not summon up old dough troughs or farmhouse ovens: it spoke of the needs of distribution, of people living alone, of smaller households and of the need to reduce food waste.

Reducing the weight does not impoverish the tradition. It forces the craft to redesign the fermentation and the baking so that the same identity can exist inside a different mass. Tradition is not fidelity to every measurement of the past: it is the ability to recognise which elements cannot be lost and which have to change so that the product goes on being used.

The oven does not repair

In the first moments of baking the heat speeds the changes up. The gases present expand, part of the water turns to vapour and the volume can still increase. Then the structure begins to set: the starch gelatinises, the proteins change and the loss of moisture contributes to the formation of the crust. This is the moment when the bread gradually stops being a dough that can be deformed.

But the oven does not rebuild what was not prepared beforehand. It does not create a network able to hold gas if the mixing and the fermentation have weakened it, it does not rebalance an excessive acidity, it does not make a bad shaping uniform. It can amplify: a good structure expands and sets, a fragile structure gives way, a surface that is too dry works against development. A dough that goes in early stays tight; one that goes in too late may no longer have the strength it needs. Fire makes the decisions taken earlier final. It does not replace them.

The image of craft bread is often completed by a flame: stacked wood, a blackened vault, a long peel and loaves set straight on the hearth. It is a real technique and it can affect the management of the heat, the crust and the characteristics of the product, but on its own it is not proof of quality. The product specification for Pane Toscano DOP allows wood-fired baking to be stated on the label when it actually matches the process used, and it does not require every Pane Toscano DOP to be baked that way: it is a possible production characteristic, not the essence of the denomination.

A modern oven, controlled with competence, does not make the bread less of a craft product; a wood-fired oven managed badly does not make the bread better. Quality depends on the ability to bring energy into the product in the way required: temperature, humidity, duration, the arrangement of the loaves and the load of the oven all have to stay coherent. Fire can have glamour. Bread needs control.

Bread goes on changing outside the oven

When it comes out, the loaf is not yet completely still. The internal temperature stays high, the moisture keeps moving from the wetter part of the crumb towards the crust and towards the air, and during cooling the structure of the starch is already beginning to reorganise. Cutting a loaf too early can compress or damage a crumb that has not yet settled; wrapping it while it is still too hot can trap condensation and change the crust.

Change continues after cooling as well. The crumb gradually tends to become firmer, the crust can lose its crispness and the water goes on redistributing itself. What we call staling is not simply drying out: it takes in changes in the structure of the starch and complex relationships between water, crust and crumb.

The starter can affect keeping quality, aroma and the course of staling. It does not make bread immortal. Even a well-fermented product has to be cooled, stored and wrapped properly, sold within a time that suits its characteristics or destined for a second use. The commercial life of bread does not begin when it is mixed: it begins when the oven has already finished its own work.

The baker does not work alone

In Pane Toscano DOP the craft of the baker belongs to a supply chain. The wheat has to be grown in the area laid down, stored and milled in Tuscany; the flours have to meet particular characteristics; farmers, millers, bakers and packers are entered in the control system and every stage has to be documented.

The loaf that goes into the oven therefore contains decisions taken before it reached the bakery: the variety grown, the moment of harvest, the conditions in which the grain was stored, the method of milling and the handling of the flour. The baker receives this material history and becomes responsible for it in the last transformation.

He cannot correct badly grown wheat in the oven. He cannot rebuild a germ damaged during milling. He can, though, recognise how that material behaves and decide how to accompany it. Craft is not always the work of a single hand: it can be the continuity between several trades that understand the mutual consequences of their work.

What the numbers do not see

The recipe is indispensable. Without quantities, records and control there is no repeatability: there is only the hope that today’s bread will resemble yesterday’s. But the recipe stops at the starting point.

It does not see how quickly the flour took up the water. It does not feel the resistance of the dough. It does not recognise the moment when the starter has reached its best activity. It does not tell a mass that produces gas from one able to hold it. It cannot know whether a fold is still useful, whether the shaping created enough tension or whether the loaf is ready to face the oven.

The baker works exactly in that distance. He turns a stable formula into a recognisable result, while the ingredients keep arriving with differences that are tiny and decisive. He does not improvise against the numbers: he sees what the numbers, on their own, cannot see. The recipe says where to begin; the baker recognises when the dough is ready to become bread.

The recipe does not see the dough. The baker does.