Returning to the Dough
YASSS recipes #24: Jerusalem Bagel Sourdough Bread + finding focus again through bread, fermentation, and the craft I know best.
For the past few years, I’ve been developing both cooking and baking recipes, and I’ve loved the freedom of moving between the two.
Cooking has given me space to explore flavor, seasonality, family meals, and the food we actually eat at home. Baking has always been there too, but recently I realized I wanted to give it more space again.
More specifically, I wanted to return to bread baking.
Not because I’m stepping away from cooking, but because bread is the foundation of how I think about food. It is where technique, patience, instinct, and creativity all meet.
The moment I started focusing on bread again, everything felt clear.
I felt calm, motivated, and deeply connected to the work. I know this world well. I understand the language of dough, fermentation, temperature, hydration, structure, and time. More importantly, I still feel endlessly curious about it.
That is usually a good sign.
After years of developing recipes, teaching, testing, and baking professionally, I’ve learned that growth doesn’t always mean moving further away from where you started.
Sometimes growth means returning with more knowledge.
Returning with sharper instincts. Returning with a better understanding of what you can offer.
That is what this feels like for me.
I’ll still share cooking recipes, because cooking is naturally part of my life and my family table. But bread baking is my core. It is the subject I can talk about forever, the craft I want to keep studying, and the thing I feel most excited to teach.
So this is not a reinvention.
It is a refocus.
And there is no better place to begin than with sourdough.
I know many people avoid sourdough during the summer because warmer temperatures can make fermentation feel less predictable. Dough moves faster, bulk fermentation shortens, and the window between perfectly proofed and overproofed becomes smaller.
But summer sourdough is not difficult when you understand temperature.
Your dough does not care what month it is. It responds to its environment.
By adjusting your water temperature, keeping your starter in a controlled place, and paying closer attention to the dough rather than the clock, you can bake beautiful sourdough all summer long.
And honestly, most of us have the air conditioning running anyway, so the house is already doing half the work.
One of my favorite loaves to bake for my family is this Jerusalem Bagel Sourdough Bread.
The idea is simple: take the flavor profile of a Jerusalem bagel and build it into a naturally leavened country loaf.
The dough is filled with deeply toasted sesame seeds. Toasting the sesame first develops a richer, nuttier flavor, but toasted seeds can also absorb moisture from the dough.
To prevent that, I hydrate them with a small amount of simple syrup + dates honey before mixing them into the dough.
This serves two purposes.
First, it keeps the seeds from pulling water out of the dough and affecting the final crumb. Second, it adds a subtle sweetness inspired by Jerusalem bagels, which are traditionally dipped in a sweet syrup before being generously coated in sesame seeds and baked.
It is a small technical step, but it makes a noticeable difference.
For the flour blend, I use bread flour for strength and structure, whole wheat flour for nutrition and deeper wheat flavor, and rye flour for complexity and fermentation.
The goal is a loaf that feels wholesome enough to bake regularly for my family, but still has the open crumb, crisp crust, and lightness that make sourdough exciting.
I bake it in my Dutch oven, which helps create the steam and intense heat needed for strong oven spring and a deeply caramelized crust.
The result is a loaf that feels familiar but new.
It carries the flavor of Jerusalem bagels, the structure of a country sourdough, and the kind of depth that only comes from slow fermentation.
For me, this is exactly what going back to my roots looks like.
Not repeating what I have already done, but taking everything I’ve learned and bringing it back to the craft that started it all.
I’m excited to bake more bread.
I’m excited to teach it with more depth.
And I’m excited to share this next chapter with you.
YASSS recipes #24: Jerusalem Bagel Sourdough Bread
Yields: 3 medium sized loaves | Prep time: 25 min + cold fermentation in fridge | Cook time: 40-50 min
Ingredients:
For the dough-
700 gr bread flour
