Slashing advice--no grigne
I have recently moved from baking Boules (which I usually scored in a square around the edges and got a decent grigne much of the time) to attempting baguettes.
But I can't seem to get the slashes to work right.
I'm visiting my wife's family, so don't have my own oven, grains, bannetons, etc. (I packed a smal piece of my sourdough in my luggage though, which my wife thinks is bordering on obsessive, but that's another story ;-)
I think I managed to compensate for the new environment and make a fairly reasonable batch of whole grain sourdough baguettes (about 40% whole wheat flour, with what my mother in law calls "Porridge Oats"--oats with other assorted mystery grains and seeds).
Fed white sourdough and soaked WW flour and grains overnight, then mixed and raised slowly over the early afternoon, shaped at dinnertime, doing the final proof in improvised baskets (bread pans lined with floured dishtowels), retarded overnight,. I took the loaves out of the fridge at about 4:00 am this morning (then back to bed), up at 6:30 to preheat the oven, baked at about 7:00 for family breakfast at 8:30.
I had lots of steam in the oven from a big solid cookie pan that I put boiling water into before and after I loaded the loaves. The oven was still steamy enough to momentarily fog up my glasses when I opened the oven to rotate the loaves after 15 minutes.
The crumb is smooth and deliciously cool, the crust is thin, caramelized mahogany brown and crackly, with little blisters all over. (Photos below.)
But I just can't get the slashes right. Even with a new, very sharp, kraft-knife blade, held at about 30° from parallel to the loaf's skin, I cant get the slashes to open up much.
The whole inside of the slash filled in nicely and expanded just a little to make the place where the slashes were completely even with the rest of the crust. But they don't open further (no grigne). So it seems like the internal pressure is sufficient, but either the steam is not enough or the slashes are done clumsily.
I recall PR recommending that one say "slit" as one slashes confidently, but the higher hydration dough "grabs" the blade as I slash the loaves. So I feel like I have to be extra gentle or I'll maul and collapse the proofed loaves. I end up gently cutting, and then going over the cuts again to get the slashes about 1/4 inch deep.
From the photos below, I hope some of you can give advice.
I'd appreciate any hints, please, on what to do differently. Deeper or shallower cuts? Different shape cuts from the vaguely "S" shaped slashes I used? Wet the blade? Proof a little less so the loaves are not so fragile?
Thanks,
Mason.
The top slash here looks like it tried to pull apart further at the very top, but just didn't manage to pull it off.
Keith asked almost the same question in this posting made about a minute after mine.
Perhaps helpful TFLers could answer both tother in the forum he created?
Thanks in advance,
Mason.
possibly if you make you slashes a little more parallel to the loaf. I can't tell if you have any splitting on the side, but that might help a little
Thanks. I think you are right. I'm going across the loaves rather than down them, as benjamin pointed out in his comment here.
Please excuse me if this is from left field. I checked the other thread, and suspect the notion of focusing the expansion on a single long cut is correct. But I wonder if another culprit here is that you proofed in bread-pans, creating a fatter, demi-baguette shape out of a recipe that really wanted to be a long, thin baguette loaf. It seems to me as though the grigne emerges as a function of fast-expanding internal gas forcing rupture of the gluten coat that holds the loaf together along a deliberately-created weak point (in addition to surface-level chemical changes involved in hardening, cracking, browning of edges, etc.), so it would be inhibited by anything that slowed the spring to the point where the surface coat stretch could keep pace with the expansion. Wouldn't just having a little larger mass of dough do this, for a recipe that was calibrated to create proper grigne with a smaller mass of dough, enabling more-rapid penetration of heat and more explosive spring?
I have made boules from this kind of recipe a lot of times. It's the placement of slashes on the baguettes that cause the problem, I think, rather than the shapes of the loaves.
But maybe I should try to make a longer baguette, just to test out that theory. That would also give me more practice at slashing. Hmmm....
I think that if you made your seam tighter and your slashes closer to parallell with the sides of the loaf you'd have better results.
That sounds about right. I'm going to try again in the next day or two (just fed the sourdough this morning). I'll post results here.