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Here are ten things that can help you make awesome artisan bread. They are in no particular order.

1. Use unbleached flour.
Bleaching white flour is harmful to the environment. It's also unfriendly to the taste of the flour. Unbleached flour simply tastes better than bleached flour and it may even be healthier for you. Try it and you will never want to go back to bleached flour again. You won't even notice a difference in color.

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2. Use a preferment.
Yeast does a lot more than just make the dough rise. It's the primary source of flavor. The way to tap into that potential is to use long fermentation times. If you whip up a batch of dough at 4PM and bake it at 6 PM, don't expect it to taste like bread. Your bread will taste like flour and yeast.

You can make awesome tasting bread from just four ingredients (flour, water, salt and yeast). You just need to give the dough some time to ferment. Can you get the best of both worlds? Can you use a portion of older dough mixed in with freshly made dough to end up with bread that is made fast, but has the flavor of a long fermentation? Yes! This is what a preferment is.

A preferment can be called many things. Poolish, Sponge, Biga, Starter, Levain... They are all pretty much the same thing. They are flour, water and yeast mixed together and left for a long period of time to develop flavor.

Use at least 30 percent of the weight of your dough as a preferment and you will notice an improvement in your bread.

Example: Mix your sponge at 8 in the morning and then let it sit on the counter all day. Make your dough at 3 PM using the sponge and then bake it at 5 PM. Winner!

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3.  Use lots of water.
Most cookbooks written more than ten years ago print bread recipes that describe very stiff doughs. A stiff dough is much easier to work with when you are kneading my hand. But the end result is a dense, crumbly bread. Chewy, light breads with large, uneven holes are beautiful and delicious. You can make them by using wetter doughs.

70 to 80 per cent hydration is what you are looking for. (i.e. 500 grams of flour with 350 to 400 grams of water).

Since wet doughs are more difficult to handle, you shouldn't knead the dough. You can stretch-and-fold it. Alternatively (but with less appealing results) you can use a stand-mixer to do the work since the wetter dough will stick to your hands.

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4. Never punch down.
Again, most general-purpose cookbooks recommend you let your dough rise and then punch it down. This is senseless! We want to have large and small bubbles spread out randomly in our bread. Punching down the dough will just create a dense bread. Leave it alone!

You will need to manipulate your dough, but when doing so, try to minimize degassing. Enough degassing will occur just by shaping it into the final loaf. So don't worry.

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5. Retard. (Put your dough in the fridge)
Try this. Whip up a batch of dough, let it start to rise for about an hour and then put it into the fridge overnight (or for several days). This is the same thing as a preferment, but better. Your whole dough is prefermented, so you don't have to mess around with making dough on the day you want bread. Just take it out of the fridge, cut off a piece, shape it, let it rise and bake it.

Slowing down the fermentation changes the character of the flavor that the yeast will contribute. It also allows chemical reactions to happen over the long period of time in the fridge that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Cold dough is also easier to handle!

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6. Use less yeast.
Most recipes call for too much yeast. The yeast companies want you to think that you need to make your dough rise as fast as possible because Bigger is Better and Faster is too!.

If you give your dough enough time (like four hours at room temperature), the yeast will multiply by themselves. If you start with the bare minimum, after a few hours on the counter the yeast population will have increased to levels that are more than enough to raise your bread. If you overpopulate your dough right from the start, the yeast will run out of food before all the wonderful bread flavors are developed. You end up with yeasty tasting bread.

As a rule of thumb, I use about 0.5 per cent yeast by weight of flour. So that's about 1/4 teaspoon of yeast per 4 cups of flour. You will need more yeast for sweet doughs since high levels of sugar make the yeast slow down (they get swollen with water, actually), but try using as little as you need to get the job done.

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7. Fold.
As your dough bakes, it expands. As the heat penetrates the dough, it solidifies the starches and proteins. This process happens from outside in, which is why bread has crust. If you plan ahead, you can make this process work to your advantage and make the dough expand into an appealing shape.

Flatten our your dough with your fingertips and fold the edges over each other to tighten the outer skin. Curl them up into the middle of the bread. This will cause the expansion of the dough to make your bread have a round shape rather than be a flattened out pancake.

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8. Use high temperature.
When you pop the dough into the oven, the high temperature will cause the gas inside the dough to expand and make the bread puff up (this is called oven spring). If the difference in temperature between the dough and the oven is not high enough, the heat will not reach the inside of the dough in time and your bread will be dense.

Turn your oven up to maximum. Also, use an oven stone (pizza stone). The stone will absorb a lot of heat and will allow the dough to pick up the heat quickly. The stone will also conduct heat away from the bread once it has reached the same temperature as the oven. The end result is that the bottom of your bread will not burn as quickly.

After the first five or six minutes at maximum, turn your oven down for the remainder of the cooking time, so as not to burn the crust. I turn the temperature down to 450 degrees for baguettes, 400 degrees for thick breads such as boules and loaves, and 350 for sweet doughs which contain sugar and will cause the crust to burn.

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9. Underproof.
Try baking your dough a little early. You get the best oven spring by baking your bread when it is a little bit underproofed. This is because a dough that is fully proofed will be too light to properly hold it's shape.

If you visit a bakery and find their baguettes are really round, it's because they were just right (not overproofed). If you find baguettes that are flat instead of perfectly round, they waited too long before baking them. The bread still tastes good, and it's nice and light. It just doesn't have a perfectly round shape.

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10. Use Steam
Steam transfers much more heat than dry air. Steam also prevents the outside of the crust from drying out too much in the oven.

You can create steam in you oven during the first few minutes of baking by putting a cast iron pan on the bottom shelf of the oven. Preheat the oven to the highest temperature to which it will go for 45 minutes. After you put your dough in the oven, you dump a cup of hot water into the steam pan and quickly shut the door. Be sure to wear an oven mitt since the steam will scald your hand. Also, cover the inside of the oven window with a towel to catch any droplets that may cause the glass to shatter due to thermal shock.

The water will evaporate over the next five minutes or so and create the steam you need to make great bread.

The steam inside your oven is at such a high temperature that you can't see it, but you can be sure that it's there. You'll see the water disappear from the bottom pan.

But...

A better way to create steam is by using an aluminum foil roasting pan to cover your bread for the first five or six minutes of baking:

This traps the humidity inside the aluminum pan and has the same effect as steaming the inside of your oven. You can wet the inside of the aluminum pan, too, to increase the amount of steam you get.

This also has the same effect as an old-world stone oven or a dutch oven. It's superior to those since it also reflects the heat back onto the bread, reducing the time you need to preheat your oven and reducing your overall oven time - that saves energy and costs less. Using this method, I find I only need to preheat the oven for 20 minutes. The aluminum pan does not need to be preheated at all.

The aluminum pan is also a lot easier to handle and cools off quickly. You can put it away 90 seconds after you take it out of the piping hot oven (really!).