Flour, Salt, and Water: Reading What's on the Shelf
Three ingredients, plus whatever's living in your starter — that's the whole list. Because it's so short, ten minutes at the store actually reading labels beats grabbing whatever's at eye level. Take them one at a time.
Flour
In the flour aisle you'll see all-purpose, bread flour, whole wheat, and maybe a bag labeled "artisan" that's really just marketing. The number that matters is protein content.
Flip the bag around to the nutrition panel. Bread flour usually runs 12 to 14 percent protein; all-purpose is more like 10 to 12. That protein turns into gluten when you mix and fold, and gluten gives your dough the structure to hold gas and rise instead of spreading flat. Think of it as 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, by preference, not because it's the only one that works. Bob's Red Mill, a store brand, anything on the shelf with a similar protein number will get you a decent loaf. Don't let anybody tell you a specific brand is required to succeed.
Whole wheat is a different animal. It keeps the bran and germ, which means more fiber, more flavor, and more thirst — it soaks up water differently than white flour. If a recipe calls for a swap, you'll usually need a little more liquid. We'll get into that math later. For now, know that a straight one-to-one swap leaves you with a stiffer, drier dough than you meant to make.
Salt
Plain salt is all you need — table salt or fine sea salt both work fine. Skip the fancy pink stuff unless you just like it. What matters more is weighing it rather than 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. This is exactly why the scale 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
Water is the one people skip over, and up here it deserves the most attention.
Utah County water is hard — high in minerals — which is 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. Heavily chlorinated water can slow your starter down or irritate it. 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 — the lesson behind my hockey-puck loaf. Our air is dry and pulls moisture out of dough fast. If your water's too cold when you mix, the dough sits sluggish and a crust starts forming before the inside's 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're weighing flour, salt, and water in grams, one thing becomes clear: a recipe written in a humid climate behaves differently in your kitchen. My daughter bakes sourdough in Austin, and 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 holds onto moisture and ours tries to steal it back. Same recipe, same percentages even, and we go back and forth trying to figure out why her crumb looks different than mine that week. It's a good reminder that the recipe is a starting point, not gospel — elevation, humidity, even how hot your kitchen runs all change 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 handed to you as a rigid schedule, as if 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, 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 and your salt, check whether you'll use filtered or tap water, and note which you're using. Next lesson we start putting numbers to all of this.