Every Sunday for a year I baked one loaf. I am not a patient person, and I chose bread for exactly that reason: it cannot be hurried, argued with or fixed afterwards. You mix four things, and then you wait.

The first loaf was a brick. So were the next eleven. I kept notes in a file called bread.txt, one line a week, and for three months every line said the same thing.

You mix four things, and then you wait. Everything I got wrong, I got wrong by not waiting.

What changed

In week fourteen I left the dough overnight by accident. It was the first loaf anyone asked for a second slice of.

The four things

• flour, weighed and not scooped;
• water, a little warmer than your hand;
• salt, more than seems right;
• time, more than seems reasonable.

A note on ovens

Mine is small, old and runs twenty degrees hot. None of that turned out to matter.