Claudio Perrando CP

Title: The Melt-in-Your-Mouth Crumb

Most sourdough recipes chase a sharp tang and call it character. They use 20-25% levain at a low pH of 3.8, with 76-78% hydration. To me, that’s the taste of efficiency. The supermarket sourdough standard.

I bake my TARTINE Country Loaf on completely different terms:

▫️ 40-50% sourdough at a high pH
▫️ 88-92% hydration
▫️ Cold proof as my crumb sculptor

Why this creates a better bread:

Smooth, not sharp. The high pH ferment eliminates aggressive acidity. You don’t taste sour – you taste the grain itself, with creamy, nutty, almost buttery layers. People tell me it melts in the mouth. That’s the point.

The custard crumb. Extreme hydration gelatinizes the starches during baking. The interior becomes moist, glossy, almost custard-like. This water-holding capacity means the bread stays crunchy for days, not hours.

Cold proof is my dial. A shorter cold proof gives me wildly open, dramatic holes. A longer, deeper one creates an even, tender crumb that’s perfect for anything. Same dough, endless control – without ever sacrificing flavor.

For me, bread isn’t just a picture of an open crumb. It’s mouthfeel. It’s longevity. It’s what you taste when the acids step back and the grain finally speaks.

This is my rebellion against one-dimensional sourdough.

The Soul of Bread:

Reflections After 30 Years at the Oven

After three decades of baking, travelling the world, and watching an industry transform, I feel compelled to share my thoughts – not just about flour and water, but about the quiet battle being fought over something most people eat every day without a second thought. These are my reflections on consulting, teaching, owning a bakery, and the strange theatre of social media baking.

How We Learned to Forget Real Bread

For a long time, the industrial tide swept through our bakeries. It brought invention, yes, but invention designed to change not just how bread was made, but how we ate it. The industry itself began to teach people what was good and what was bad. Enzymes, improvers, and a cocktail of chemicals reshaped the loaf. Bread rolls became light as feathers, impossibly crunchy, swollen to sizes that defied their ingredients. Classic loaves like Baguettes and Ciabatta were reduced to silhouettes – one single mass-produced dough, pressed into a shape that merely hinted at the name on the label. The crumb told no story; only the outline gave a clue.

Over decades, people grew accustomed to these illusions. The surface became everything. The presentation of the shop, the glossy shine of the bread, the caramel colouring sprayed on to suggest health and wholegrain – all of it was a sleight of hand. The main focus shifted to distraction. The industry became expert at deceiving us, and we, as consumers, slowly forgot what bread was supposed to deliver.

The Sourdough Wave and the Forgotten Truth

A shift began a few years ago. People rediscovered natural sourdough, and many bakeries started riding this wave with great ceremony. Sourdough was suddenly praised as the holy grail, the ancient secret that would save us all. But here is what the marketing often left out: sourdough alone is not the miracle. The most important factor in baking, the one that truly transforms flour and water into something alive and digestible, is long fermentation. You can call it sourdough, you can call it a pre-ferment, but without time – real, patient time – you are simply performing another trick. Too many bakeries miss this point and cash in on the label without the substance.

The Quiet Death of the Middle-Ground Bakery

While the sourdough banners fly, traditional family bakeries are dying. Many still live in a bubble, proudly claiming “100 years of tradition.” To me, this too often means 100 years of not improving what you do, not truly trying to satisfy a changing client, only guessing at what people like. They chain themselves to a price range dangerously close to the supermarket, hoping volume will save them. But clients feel this. They get the impression that every medium-sized bakery eventually delivers the same quality as the discount aisle. The result? The middle ground is collapsing. The big industrial bakeries grow because they make cheap bread on an enormous scale, and the new artisan bakeries capture those who have lost trust. The middle bakeries, with their huge assortment of uninspired products, are fading away.

The Artisan Hype and Its Shadow

Newcomers and home bakers have opened tiny artisan shops with great success, and for good reason: people trust a face, a story, a pair of flour-dusted hands. But we are arriving at a breaking point here too, because under the umbrella of “artisan” there are vast differences in quality. Not every small bakery can really deliver the quality they promote. The lack of deep knowledge covers up a multitude of things, especially in the pastry section. Croissants that are hailed as masterpieces are often made from simple doughs with huge amounts of yeast, enzymes, and improvers – with zero fermentation. Panettone sold for a premium, wrapped in words like “natural fermentation” and “pure ingredients,” is sometimes baked with flour that comes directly from a chemical lab.

The truth, as always, seems to hover somewhere in the middle. The battle between artisan bakeries is only going to get bigger, and sooner or later, only the genuine high quality that really justifies a high price will prevail.

The Future I See

I believe we will soon see small artisan bakeries on every corner, much like before the industrial era swallowed everything. But something else is coming that many small bakers don’t expect. Industrial bakeries will start to battle back with genuinely high-quality bread, because with the right knowledge, even a big factory can produce something great. I’ve lived this myself: I’ve baked highest-quality, high-hydration breads entirely by machine in a large plant. The machinery is getting better, the flour is improving, and the knowledge is spreading. Every baker – small or large – needs to watch out. The future belongs to those who can combine skill and truth, not just a marketing story. Small artisan bakeries will have to concentrate fiercely on high quality, stay truly innovative, and build deep personal contact with their clients. That’s the only shield.

The Strange Mirror of Social Media

Bread baking in social media has made its own seismic shift. Twelve or thirteen years ago, it started with Facebook groups where you could present your loaf and small communities took root. Knowledge began to flow between people who shared the same quiet obsession. We learned from each other. Then Instagram took over, and now those Facebook groups are slowly dying because Instagram and TikTok offer faster scrolling. For me, TikTok still lacks seriousness for bread baking; it has a superficial reputation, full of fake accounts for people who just flick up and down without ever landing. Instagram I see as more serious, still the leader in visual storytelling. I mourn the slow death of the Facebook groups because I loved the idea of building small, steady communities around a genuine shared interest.

My Mission Remains

After 30 years of baking, traveling the world, and watching all these currents collide, my mission is unchanged. I want to inspire. I want to fight for our craft, because most people still think bread must be cheap – that it’s only water and flour, nothing more. But bread is much more. Bread is alive. Bread is life itself, one of the oldest foods we have. My passion burns as high as it ever did. That’s why I’ve poured everything I know into a book, which will be available soon – another way to share this knowledge and reach people beyond the walls of my bakery. With my bakery, I will put my true stamp of quality on this craft, and I will keep pushing until the real story of bread is the only one worth telling.

After 30 years of baking around the world, teaching, and working hard – my own baking style is finally here. 🖤

My book is finished. Pre-orders are now live on Amazon.

This is a very special moment for me. I never read a baking book. I never took a course. I only followed my imagination, tried, failed, and got back up. Everything I know, I taught myself.

That’s why this book is different. My recipes are unlike the usual ones you know. In these pages, I share my favorite recipes and everything I’ve learned my way.

Right now the book is in German, but English, Spanish, and Italian will follow.

📖 Pre-order link in bio / below
https://amzn.eu/d/0cJr6YFw

To everyone wondering where to put the butter or jam: this bread isn’t meant to be like the one from the bakery next door. It’s meant to be different – on purpose.

83% hydration. 0.8% sourdough – my Panettone Pasta Madre. T80 + whole rye. 75% of the flour with W340. Fermented to the limit. No sourness. Melts in the mouth.

This is not a ‘marmalade-holder’. This is a perfect side dish. Eat it alone. Dip it. Or take soft butter with a pinch of salt – that’s all it asks for.