The bread and pizza recipes in this book are designed for home cooks working with home ovens, not wood-fired setups. As romantic as cooking with fire can be, it’s out of reach for most people, and unnecessary for achieving deeply flavorful, structurally sound, and beautifully baked results. These recipes have been developed and tested specifically for conventional ovens, with adjusted hydration levels and fermentation times to ensure they work reliably in a home setting.

You’ll notice that nearly all the doughs here are mixed by hand, which is my preferred method. While a stand mixer can be helpful, it’s not essential, and I’ve found that getting your hands into the dough gives you a more intuitive sense of how it’s developing. Flour and water behave differently depending on environmental conditions, and yeast is very temperature sensitive. Your hands are the best tools for reading the dough.

Most of the recipes also include an autolyse, a short rest after combining flour and water. This step jump-starts gluten formation and helps the dough come together more easily. For higher-hydration doughs, some recipes also use a double hydration method, in which most of the water is added at the beginning, and the remaining water is incorporated after the autolyse. This technique improves dough structure and manageability, especially when mixing by hand. Instead of intensive kneading, I rely on stretch-and-folds, gentle, periodic folds that build strength gradually without overworking the dough. It’s a method favored by professional bakers and well suited to long-fermented, high-hydration doughs.

You also won’t find volume measurements here. I use grams exclusively for all dough recipes because they offer precision, consistency, and scalability. Measuring by volume (cups, tablespoons) can throw off hydration and fermentation, and in bread and pizza making, those small differences really matter. A digital kitchen scale is essential and once you start using one, you won’t want to go back…promise!

One last tip: always preheat your oven for at least an hour before baking to give your steel or stone enough time to come to full temperature. And if you’re baking multiple loaves or pizzas, let the baking surface recover its heat between rounds—it makes all the difference for crust development and oven spring.