Brothers Green Eats are calling this Bread Porn, the perfect sourdough loaf

Wow. I didn't realize making bread was so sexy.

You'll notice he's using the NYT no-knead method of overnight proofing. But he takes much greater care. He pulls out and stretches the cardinal points of the dough ball and overlaps them. This redistributes the yeast cells and reinvigorates them to reproducing by placing them next to new partners. And it is a form of kneading. Time is a form of kneading. So the no-knead method actually does have kneading.

The technique relies on a wet dough. He weighed his flour first then added 85% of its weight in water for 85% hydration. The gluten development that occurred overnight is apparent by how the wet dough stretched in the bowl. Bakers have a way of checking by removing a dough wad and stretching it out flatly in their fingertips like a window pane. The better it works as a window, the better the gluten development. But we see the same thing as Mike pulls it, and how it reattaches to itself so readily.

This is a cloche method. An oven inside an oven hot as it will go. The closed environment keeps the dough wet as it heats and bubbles inside expand far as they can go before the dough skin bakes. After that, further expansion must break through the crust and that's why the loaves are slashed with a razor, to direct that outward bursting.

This will be a mild sourdough, fermented only overnight. Definitely different from usual bread, but not very powerful. It took me years and a couple of books and untold number of online pages to comprehend and internalize that further fermentation results in stronger sourdough flavor, further development, and weaker looser, less lively dough. The organisms are consuming the dough as it ferments. This must be done cold. To slow down the activity. So the whole baking experience is a matter of controlling temperature, comfortably warm for yeast reproduction, and encouraging yeast unrestrained orgy, then chilling to slow down the party, then back again to higher temperature and higher activity but now weakened, then extremely high heat to kill them at the height of their yeast-passion. It's cruel. It's manipulative. It's we humans lording it over single cell organisms, playing on their single cell passion. 

Yeast cells actually have two ways to replicate, haploid and diploid, by budding, cloning themselves, and by sexing it up with their corresponding type. It's part of the brilliance of their survival capability that get them through extreme environmental hardships that include drying out and being frozen and lifted thousands of feet into the atmosphere, even bashed around in blenders.

One time I made nine little animated gifs held together inside an html table that shows yeast diploid reproduction but in Spanish. That was the best example that I found at the time. Eight gifs ran with their first frame held for extra seconds while the first gif ran through its frames then stopped, then the second frame, third frame and so on. This took a lot of mathematical planning. And set that to music. The success of the set running in timely fashion one to the next seamlessly depended upon the speed of the browser loading them all at once. Internet connections and computer speeds have improved considerably since then. Alas, it is gone. The files were hosted on a place that increased their cost unreasonably. Too bad. It was lovely. 

And that does it. I hereby resolve to make that set all over again. But with CSS, tables are incredibly passé. When you make them, the panes no longer fit together tightly. I'll have to think of something else.