Lean dough

Lean dough is bread reduced to Wheat flour, Water, Salt, and leaven — commercial yeast, Levain, or both. Fat, sugar, eggs, and milk are not part of the definition. King Arthur Baking's baker's-percentage examples for white bread, ciabatta, and French bread are this shape: flour 100%, water as hydration, salt near 2%, yeast as a small percent ¹. Calvel's French bread is the same craft ².

Enriched dough is the other family. King Arthur's autolyse teaching is explicit: the rest of flour and water is most applicable to lean doughs; eggs, sugar, and whole milk interfere with gluten during that pause ³.

What to notice #

In Baker's percentage, a lean formula is readable: hydration is the water line (after preferments are recast), salt is seasoning and gluten tightening, yeast or levain is Inoculation. There is no butter line to hide behind. The dough should become cohesive and extensible; it should not look like cake batter unless you mixed a very wet hearth dough on purpose.

Failure is calling a brioche "lean" because it is bread, or calling a country loaf "enriched" because it has flavor. Flavor in a lean loaf comes from flour, fermentation, and the bake — including Hearth bread steam — not from sugar. The teaching Country loaf (teaching formula) is lean sourdough.