How this journal is organised
The six desks
We file by subject, not by difficulty. Each desk is anchored to a position on the crust scale — from a jar of starter that has not seen an oven, to the burnt edge nobody admits to liking.
The crust scale
The number is a position, not a rating. A piece at 05 is not easier than one at 96 — it simply sits earlier in the bake.
- 00Raw
- 20Pale
- 40Golden
- 60Amber
- 80Deep bake
- 100Char
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Crust05
Starter & Ferment
Keeping a wild culture alive without letting it become a second job. Feeding ratios, what a stiff starter buys you, how to read a jar that has gone quiet, and the long-running argument about whether discard is an ingredient or a guilt trip.
- Maintenance
- Hydration ratios
- Discard
- Reviving a neglected jar
28 pieces filed -
Crust22
Cold Proof
The fridge is the one tool that lets a full-time job and a long ferment coexist. Retarding schedules, which shelf actually runs coldest, what eighteen hours does to flavour that four hours cannot, and the proving box we built for under forty dollars.
- Retarding
- Fridge mapping
- Overnight schedules
- Proving boxes
19 pieces filed -
Crust44
Everyday Loaves
The breads you make on repeat rather than for an occasion. Tin loaves that hold up to a week of sandwiches, bâtards that fit a domestic oven, focaccia as a weeknight proposition, and timings written around the hours people actually have.
- Tin loaves
- Bâtards
- Focaccia
- Weeknight timings
41 pieces filed -
Crust61
Milled Here
Grain grown in Aotearoa and the small mills still turning it into flour. What changes in the first fortnight after milling, why wholegrain drinks more water than the packet suggests, and what we learned standing in four mills within a day's drive.
- Fresh flour
- Stone milling
- Wholegrain hydration
- Mill visits
16 pieces filed -
Crust78
Sweet & Enriched
Butter, egg and sugar rewrite every rule the lean doughs taught you. Lamination that survives a warm kitchen, brioche that does not tear, buns that stay soft on day two, and the two degrees of butter temperature that decide all of it.
- Lamination
- Brioche
- Buns
- Butter temperature
23 pieces filed -
Crust96
Field Notes
Everything that does not fit a recipe format. Mornings spent on someone else's bench, equipment that earned its place and equipment that did not, reader questions worth answering at length, and the failures that taught us more than the successes.
- Bakery visits
- Equipment
- Instructive failures
- Reader questions
34 pieces filed
The Saturday Dispatch
One email, most Saturdays: what we filed that week, the room temperature it was tested at, and one thing that went wrong. No recipe roundups, no affiliate links.