Flour, Salt, and Water: Reading What's on the Shelf
Three ingredients. That's the whole list, plus whatever's living in your starter. So it's worth ten minutes at the store actually reading labels instead of grabbing whatever's at eye level.
Flour
Go to the flour aisle and you'll see all-purpose, bread flour, whole wheat, maybe a bag labeled "artisan" that's really just marketing. Here's what matters: protein content.
Flip the bag around and look at the nutrition panel. Bread flour usually runs 12 to 14 percent protein. All-purpose is more like 10 to 12. That protein is what turns into gluten when you mix and fold, and gluten is what gives your dough structure to hold gas and rise instead of just spreading flat. Think of it like rebar in concrete. The concrete's not going anywhere without something to grab onto.
I use King Arthur bread flour for most of my loaves. That's just my preference, I'm not going to tell you it's the only one that works. Bob's Red Mill, a store brand, whatever's on the shelf with a similar protein number will get you a decent loaf. Don't let anybody tell you that you need a specific brand to succeed here.
Whole wheat is a different animal. It's got the bran and germ still in it, which means more fiber, more flavor, and more thirst. Whole wheat flour soaks up water differently than white flour, so if a recipe calls for a swap you'll usually need to add a little more liquid. We'll get into that math later. For now, just know a straight one-to-one swap will leave you with a stiffer, drier dough than you meant to make.
Salt
Plain salt. That's it. Don't buy the fancy pink stuff for this unless you just like it — table salt or fine sea salt both work fine. What matters more is that you're weighing it, not measuring by volume, because salt density varies a lot brand to brand and a teaspoon of one isn't the same weight as a teaspoon of another. We already talked about the scale. This is exactly why it earns its 15 dollars.
Salt does two jobs here. It flavors the bread, obviously, but it also tightens up the gluten and slows the fermentation down a touch. Too little salt and your dough ferments too fast and tastes flat. Too much and it can choke your starter's activity right out. There's a real reason the recipes call for a specific gram amount and not "a pinch."
Water
This is the one people skip over and it's the one I'd tell you to pay the most attention to, especially up here.
Our water is hard. Utah County water runs high in minerals, and that's mostly fine for baking, sometimes even good for it since minerals give the yeast something to feed on. What you want to watch is chlorine. If your water's heavily chlorinated, it can slow your starter down or irritate it, same as it would irritate you drinking straight bleach water, though obviously less dramatic. If your starter seems sluggish and you've fed it right, try leaving your water out on the counter for an hour before you use it, or just use filtered. Cheap fix, worth trying before you blame yourself.
Temperature matters too, and I learned this one the hard way, which I already told you about with my hockey-puck loaf. Our air is dry, and dry air pulls moisture out of dough fast. If your water's too cold when you mix, the dough sits there sluggish and a crust starts forming before the inside's even had a chance to get going. I aim for water around 78 to 80 degrees when I'm mixing a dough, warmer in winter, cooler in summer. A kitchen thermometer helps here too, another cheap tool that pays for itself.
Reading recipes with all this in mind
Once you start weighing flour, salt, and water in grams, you'll notice something. A recipe written by somebody in a humid climate is going to behave differently in your kitchen. My daughter's in Austin, and she does sourdough too — we send loaf photos back and forth most weekends. Her dough at 75 percent hydration looks nothing like mine at the same percentage, because her air is holding onto moisture and ours is trying to steal it back. We'll go back and forth trying to figure out why her crumb looks different than mine that week, same recipe, same percentages even. It's a good reminder that the recipe is a starting point, not gospel. Elevation, humidity, even how hot your kitchen runs, all of it changes the outcome.
That's the biggest gap in a lot of online recipes. They're written by someone at sea level in a humid kitchen and they hand you a rigid schedule like it applies everywhere. At about 4,600 feet with our dry air, I've learned to watch the dough instead of the clock. If it looks ready early, it probably is.
One real caution here, nothing dramatic: if you're storing flour long term, keep it somewhere it won't pick up moisture or pests, a sealed container, not the paper bag left open on the counter. Flour left open in a garage or pantry with any humidity swing can go buggy faster than you'd think.
Before next time
Grab your flour, your salt, and check your water situation, filtered or tap, and note which you're using. Next lesson we start putting numbers to all this.