November 15, 2005 - 4:16pm
Couronne
I tried baking a Couronne this weekend:
The bad news: the dough was too slack for me to shape very well, so it didn't turn out terribly pretty.
The good news: the slack dough made wonderful bread. Even with a quarter of the flour whole wheat, it was light and airy. We gobbled it up.
The recipe was roughly the rustic bread I've baked many times. I think I went a little heavier on the whole wheat than usual, but I wasn't paying close attention.
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Floyd,
I've not heard of Couronne. Any source of information and the recipe.
Thanks.
Bruce -
Check out the comments on this article. That covers the sum total of my knowledge of Couronne (and also includes the recupe I used, roughly).
Tonight I'll see if can look it up and learn more about what a couronne traditionally is. As I said, I was totally winging it here.
There is a great video on the masters series of Julia Childs on PBS with Steve Sullivan of ACME...that displays how to make a masterful couronne. There's even a little trick to making the hole instead of rolling a log and connecting the ends. I have yet to try, even though I recently acquired some vintage french bannetons with the cone in the center just like those in the video. Just need to have the linen redone.
I hope this link works for you. Since upgrading my mac, for whatever reason I am unable to play the video anymore.
http://www.pbs.org/juliachild/meet/sullivan.html
Thanks Marc, the video is well worth watching for the dough handling alone.
I presume you tried upgrading the player or using a different one. My mac hard drive failed recently, so I've had to download a bunch of stuff to get back to my working mode, had no problem with this using realplayer.
I finally got the video to play too. I recently loaded RealPlayer and maybe that was the fix.
I originally saw that episode on TV one sunday morning about a year ago, and it's the catalyst that prompted me to jump into making pain au levain. I had begun making various breads using Bigas, but when I saw the process with the firm starter and the look of the bread, it reminded me of the bread I get at Balthazar in NYC and I knew—that's the kind of bread I want to learn how to make. Now my wife says, this is "better than Balthazar." But, maybe she's just being nice.