Secondary fermentations do wonders. A perfectly made dough without a secondary fermentation can never be as good as the same dough with a secondary fermentation because it will lack a factor that is implicit to good tasting bread. Lightness, fluffiness. A secondary fermentation removes denseness from the loaf that cannot be got rid of by any amount of oven spring. An even 1:1 ratio of fermentation times seems good, but a small extension of the secondary fermentation seems smart.

A 2 hour primary fermentation with a 2 hour secondary fermentation is fine, but for hearth breads, I think it needs to go farther. I will increase my time in increments of 30, and inevitably, I'll reach the limit that produces a sour, alcoholic bread. But once I do reach that limit, I'll have the perfect time for that secondary fermentation.

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Bread has two core components, flour, and yeast. All other ingredients are merely for flavor, texture, and fun times.

Bread flour is made from hard wheat (mostly red wheat I think), and is defined by its percentage of protein. The protein we attach to flour is gluten, which is strange since gluten isn't really a protein. In most grains (in varying amounts), two proteins exist, glyadin and glutenin, and when they get hydrated with water, they bond into gluten. Prior to mixing, little bundles of gluten are interspersed within the dough, but when mixing does occur, the gluten bonds to other gluten, and long chains of gluten are established. After this stage of gluten development, the long chains bond to other long chains, and as kneading begins, this process continues until a dense, confusing network of gluten exists through out the dough. At this point, the network is so dense, that bubbles of carbon dioxide can be trapped, allowing the dough to rise.

Yeast provides the other side of the equation and creates the carbon dioxide that raises the bread. Yeast is a single celled organism that ingests glucose (simple sugar) and belches out carbon dioxide. It eats the sugar, and in order to facilitate this, it has enzymes that break up the starch chains within the flour into glucose (these enzymes are also present in the flour itself). For this reason, longer fermentations produce better tasting bread as more sugar is broken free for us to taste. But in order to produce that taste, the fermentation must also be slower, so the yeast doesn't eat the sugar before we can. So the slower a fermentation is, the more delicious your bread will be (NOT what Yakitate Japan tells you...) During yeast fermentation, a yeast cell (we'll call him Ted) will sit on top of a gluten fiber and chow down on the surrounding glucose that is produced naturally in the flour, and as a result of the mechanical destruction of starch chains during milling. Ted has two cousins, Active Dry Yeast (Andy), and Cake (Cake). Cake is his big brother, and Andy is his lazy cousin. Me personally, I hate Andy, you have to splash him with warm water, and then feed him before he does anything for you, so I'd rather use Ted. And Cake is mature, so he won't last too long, he's not resilient like Ted (Active Dry Yeast is inconvenient to use, and cake yeast/fresh yeast dies too quickly) Instant yeast is the best type of yeast to use, it can be added directly to flour, and doesn't require hydration for use.

Something really important is water content, in other words, hydration. Supposedly, rustic bread is usually made with high amounts of water (in excess of 70% by weight water:flour). Which makes sense. Bread should be soft, but it should also be hard and crusty. At any rate, its good be use a nice sticky dough because that means that theres a larger reservoir of water to draw from during the baking process. Less water will evaporate, and your bread will be softer.

Then its time to bake. I've found that per cup of flour that I use to make the dough, the baking time is 10 minutes for each cup. But bread usually bakes for at least 15 minutes anyway.

When making french bread and other types of european style hearth breads, its nice to get a crusty crust. In order to achieve this, industrial ovens pump their ovens full of steam during the first critical crust forming moments of the baking process. Most people don't have industrial ovens, so somehow we must create steam in the oven during the beginning of baking. One method is to use a spray bottle to mist the dough and the oven, as that water vaporizes, steam is produced. The other method (long term method anyway) is to put a pan of boiling water in the bottom of the oven, and let the heat of the oven continually vaporize the water into steam. The only way this helps is by keeping the surface of the dough from hardening into a crust so there is maximum oven spring. Oven spring, by the way, is the amount of rise that the dough experiences in the oven by the increased metabolic rate the yeast undergoes due to extreme temperatures before it dies, and the vaporization of water inside of the dough. Perhaps steaming dough helps create a crusty crust by cooking the surface of dough two ways, boiling/steaming it, then baking it. The boiling water would take more heat to evaporate then the dough would absorb while baking ordinarily. But thats just speculation, I'm sure this has been researched in the past, I just don't know the reason.

Along with the 10 minute rule, there are three critical reactions that must occur within your dough during the baking process. These reactions are gelatinization, denaturing, and caramelization.

Gelatinization happens to the starch in your bread. Starch absorbs liquid. As the temperature reaches the bursting point of about 210 F, starches will absorb more and more water, but when the bursting point is reached, starches gel. Gelatinization is when the starch bursts, they spread out in all directions and interact with other starches in a tangled mess that produces a piece of dough that can be cut, or in other words bread. Besides clarification of the dough, gelatinization removes the floury taste of starch from the bread by bringing the glucose molecules to the forefront of the bread, gelatinization solidifies the dough and allows the glucose to be tasted.

Protein roasting. Heat denatures proteins. And gluten is made up of many many proteins. So the initial application of heat denatures the proteins and pulls them out into long polypeptide chains. Various chains intermingle with one another and get interconnected. Then the heat increases still further and the tangled chains start getting roasted. High heat cooks off water, concentrating flavors, so protein roasting does one of two things, it strengthens the crumb of the bread through denaturing, then it concentrates flavors by cooking off excess water.

Finally, the crust of the bread must caramelize. The temperature inside the dough should reach upwards of 220 F in order to be done, but as any good chemistry student knows, when you have two objects of different temperature, eventually the difference in heat will equilibriate and become more equal. One of the objects is the dough, and the other objects are the infinite amount of air molecules whizzing around in your oven at 450 F or 500 F. Long before the dough temperature registers 500 F, the crust will, and when this happens, the sugars will roast and brown beautifully. In this way, caramelization of the crust will beautify your bread.

After all these baking processes, the bread must cool down. Gelatinization begins at 160F, and continues on to whatever temperature you choose to heat your dough. Rustic breads must be heated to around 205F and enriched breads should be heated to about 195F. Until that bread cools past 160F, the starches are still gelatinizing and by cutting into the bread, you interrupt this process and the dough will be soggy and underdone, or at leat appear so. For this reason, you must allow the bread to cool to around room temperature 80F will do. The main reason for this is to maintain the gelatinization of the starches to their full potential. The evaporation of water from the starches is meant to "intensify" flavor by preventing any watering down of the sugars present in the bread. Also, heat can cover up or mask the flavor of the bread in all its complexity. For the effort, time, and money you put into your loaf, you must not let this happen! But when it has cooled down, your bread will be wonderful. Enjoy.