10/02/2026
We talk a lot about slow fermentation, but there’s another ingredient doing a lot of heavy lifting in our bread: water!
We use a lot of it…more than is particularly convenient, actually. But that extra water is a big part of what gives our bread its flavor, texture, keeping quality, and digestibility.
So, why make bread this wet?
Let’s get into it. 💧
And yes, it comes straight from the city of St. Paul.
Once that water is in the dough, it keeps working. It becomes steam that helps the loaf spring in the oven. It helps starches gelatinize into crumb. It keeps the surface flexible while the loaf expands. And plenty of it stays behind.
That last bit is important: it’s part of why the inside of our bread stays tender instead of drying out the minute it cools.
Flour gets most of the attention, but water is the second-largest ingredient in our dough by weight. Together, flour and water make up about 99% of it.
An 85% hydration level is what we consider home base for most our hearth loaves. (That’s 85 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour).
And that number isn’t absolute. Flour changes with the harvest, season, humidity, grain and even how long the bag has been sitting. Our bakers adjust accordingly.
Because when you give grain enough water and enough time you let it become what it’s supposed to become.
High hydration contributes to the custardy, tender crumb we’re after. It helps bread stay good longer. It plays a role in developing those deep reddish-brown crusts. And it helps the starches in the grain fully gelatinize during baking.
It’s harder bread to make. We think it’s much better bread to eat.
So why isn’t all bread made this way?
Because wet dough is a pain in the butt to work with, especially for machines.
As bakeries industrialized, firmer, drier dough became useful because it could move cleanly through dividers, belts, and other equipment. The industry has a phrase for it: efficient machinability.
Great for machines. But not our kind of bread.
That’s the simplest way to think about bread: fermented, cooked grain. Water has a job in both.
During a
