A Friday at Billy Bread, From the Levain to Your Front Door

People ask me what I do all day, and the honest answer is that most of the week I am not baking at all. I am answering texts, ordering flour, and moving dough around a schedule in my head. The baking happens on Friday. Here is what one actually looks like.

Thursday afternoon, the cutoff

Orders close Thursday. This is not me being precious about it. It is arithmetic. I mix in batches sized to what has been ordered, and a loaf that gets added Friday morning is a loaf that has not been fermenting since the night before. There is no way to hurry that up. Sourdough does not care that you are in a rush, which is either the most annoying or the most reassuring thing about it depending on the week.

So Thursday afternoon I print the list, add it up, and find out what kind of night I am about to have.

Thursday evening, the levain

The starter lives in my kitchen and has been alive for years now. Thursday evening I take some of it and build a levain, which is just a bigger, more energetic version of the same thing, timed so it peaks when I need it. Feed it, cover it, leave it somewhere warm, go to bed at a normal hour and try not to think about it.

Then the sourdough gets mixed and starts its long slow bulk ferment overnight. Flour, water, salt, levain. That is the entire ingredient list. No commercial yeast, no dough conditioner, no preservative other than the salt. Not as a marketing position. There is just no reason to put anything else in bread that gets eaten within a few days of coming out of the oven.

Four in the morning, give or take

The alarm goes off around four. Sometimes earlier. On a heavy week it is two, and I have stopped pretending that is unusual. This is the part nobody pictures when they imagine owning a bakery. It is dark, it is quiet, and the kitchen is the only lit room in the house. I shape the loaves one at a time. Shaping is the part that took me the longest to get right, and it is the part I would still call a skill rather than a recipe. You are building tension in the dough so it goes up in the oven instead of out.

People assume the Coyote sourdough is named after something I see out the window at this hour. It is not. It is named after my kids’ school. Sycamore Canyon Elementary’s mascot is the Coyotes, and when the fourth grade was studying the California Gold Rush I made them a video about it, because sourdough is genuinely part of that story. Settlers carried starters west, kept them alive on the trail, and ended up using the word sourdough for a person rather than a bread: a sourdough was somebody who had survived out there long enough to still have a living starter. I named a loaf after a school mascot and got a history lesson thrown in.

The oven

Loaves go in scored. The score is not decoration, or not only decoration. It is where you are telling the loaf to open, and if you do not tell it, it will decide for itself and usually pick somewhere ugly.

Then it is batches, all morning. Sourdough first because it wants the hottest oven. Milk bread after, which is a completely different animal: enriched, soft, made with a tangzhong, and involving an amount of butter I have decided not to think about too hard. Focaccia somewhere in there. Cookies when there are cookies.

By mid morning the house smells like the inside of a bakery, which after five and a half years I have not stopped noticing.

Afternoon, the part I actually like

Then it goes out. Pickups from my place, and deliveries around Newbury Park, Thousand Oaks, Westlake Village and Lake Sherwood. The bread is still warm for a good part of that run, which is the entire point and also the reason I have never been tempted to ship anything.

The best part of the week happens in driveways. Somebody takes the bag, and about one time in three they tear the corner off the loaf before they have made it back inside. They usually look a little guilty about it. They should not. That is the whole job, right there.

Then I clean the kitchen, which takes longer than you would think, and start again on Monday.

The menu is here if you want to be on next Friday’s list, and orders close Thursday. If you would rather learn to do this yourself, the class is here, and I promise the four in the morning part is optional.