Your (better) daily bread

Fall’s cooler temperatures prompting you to get baking? I asked Tim Jordan, baker for Old Soul Co.—which, by the way, has recently expanded its lunch offerings to include pizza, soup and a special sandwich—for his top tips for baking great bread at home:

1. “For great flavor, use a simple pre-ferment from one day ahead; you don’t need a long-cultivated or complicated starter.”

2. “Commercial instant [active dry] yeast is virtually bullet-proof these days; don’t sweat ‘testing’ or worry about specific water temps.”

3. “For good crust in French bread, focus on creating good ‘surface tension’ when shaping; add water to a hot oven in first minutes of baking to create steam for good expansion; make sure oven is plenty hot … it’s pretty hard to burn bread.”

4. “Use King Arthur bread flour. It is the best.”