Tartine Baguettes, alfanso-style
Double hydration mix with 75% hydration mixed flour levain and 100 % hydration AP poolish.
Back from a few weeks on the road and itching to get back in the kitchen for a bake. For some reason I had an of-the-moment hankering to do this bread, probably due to all of the Tartine this and that activity on TFL drilled into my skull over time. No book, so I relied on the internet to yield the specific formula for these. And came away with a bit of head scratching due to minor differences or sketchy details from site to site. But there was enough concurrence to know what to follow and what I wanted to alter.
The dough is a curiosity in that it uses a combination of preferments - one levain and one commercially yeasted. Additionally I followed one posted formula using double hydration, which makes for a squishy incorporation by hand when the final 10% of the water is added with the salt.
Where I went off the rails - hence the alfanso-style twist...
- Upped the overall hydration from ~64% to 67% and increased the salt to 1.8%.
- used IDY instead of ADY for the poolish while acknowledging that IDY use is at ~3/4 that of ADY.
- Dropped the IDY in the poolish from the astonishingly huge 1.5% to the "more normal" 0.12%. The poolish had completely matured in under 7 hours, still less than my anticipated 10 hour time frame. At 1.5%, it would have taken over my kitchen kinda like in that episode of I Love Lucy.
- Used my standard 75% mixed flour levain instead of the 100% AP flour levain.
- Dropped the autolyse and Letter Fold intervals from 40 to 30 minutes, so that the entire bulk rise completed in 2.5 hours rather than something like 4 hours.
- Used my standard 150 French Folds, 5 minute rest and final 150 FFs before bulk rise.
- Retarded for the remainder of the day, divide and final shape late at night and an early morning bake directly out of retard this morning.
Although somewhat dry to the touch, the dough remained quite extensible throughout, including final shaping. It also shed a surprising amount of water onto the couche between last night and bake time.
So far the taste is good, but not necessarily anything to write home about. Maybe my recent consumption has been the sesame semolinas and olive loaves where the flavor of the loaf is elevated beyond a standard Pain au Levain type of flavor profile. Dunno. But excellent crunch to the crust and a modestly open crumb. Will make some really fine toast!
400x4 baguettes.
| Tartine Baguettes, Alfanso style | |||||||||||
| 75% Hydr. Levain & Poolish, double hydration | |||||||||||
| Chad Robertson | |||||||||||
| Total Fermented | Total Fermented | Total Flour | |||||||||
| Total Dough Weight (g) | 1600 | in Levain | 14.30% | in Poolish | 14.30% | Fermented | 28.60% | ||||
| Total Formula | Stiff Levain | Poolish | Final Dough | ||||||||
| Ingredients | % | Grams | % | Grams | % | Grams | Ingredients | Grams | |||
| Total Flour | 100.00% | 940.5 | 100% | 134.5 | 100% | 134.5 | Final Flour | 671.7 | |||
| AP Flour | 69.30% | 651.8 | 60% | 80.7 | 100% | 134.5 | AP Flour | 436.6 | |||
| Rye | 2.86% | 26.9 | 20% | 26.9 | Rye | 0.0 | |||||
| Whole Wheat | 2.86% | 26.9 | 20% | 26.9 | Whole Wheat | 0.0 | |||||
| Bread Flour | 25.00% | 235.1 | Bread Flour | 235.1 | |||||||
| Water | 67.00% | 630.2 | 75% | 100.9 | 100% | 134.5 | Water | 394.8 | |||
| Salt | 1.80% | 16.9 | Salt | 16.9 | |||||||
| IDY | 0.02% | 0.19 | 0.12% | 0.16 | IDY | 0 | |||||
| Liquid Levain Starter | 1.08% | 10.16 | 7.55% | 10.15 | |||||||
| Levain | 235.4 | ||||||||||
| Poolish | 269.0 | ||||||||||
| Totals | 169.92% | 1600.0 | 182.55% | 245.5 | 200% | 269.2 | 1589.6 | ||||
| Mix levain, poolish, flours, and 90% of water. Autolyse 30 minutes | |||||||||||
| Add salt & remaining water | |||||||||||
| 150 French Folds, 5 minute rest, final 150 FFs. | |||||||||||
| Dbl. Hydr. dough initially very wet to incoporate, but comes together really well during FFs. | |||||||||||
| 2.5 hour bulk rise. Letter Folds at 30, 60, 90 & 120 minutes. Rest for 30 minutes before retard. | |||||||||||
| Dough remains extensible through final shaping. | |||||||||||
| Overnight retard | |||||||||||
| Divide, pre shape and bench rest 10 minutes | |||||||||||
| Shape and retard for a few hours. Light dusting of couche. | |||||||||||
| Preheat oven to 500dF | |||||||||||
| Bake at 475dF till brown. ~13 minutes with steam, 15 more and 2 minutes venting. | |||||||||||
Comments
open on the inside which is odd for having 2 preferments. But they have to taste good and with 6% whole grains the flavor must be a little weak as you note. Like J Hamelman says you can tell the baker by the slashing and I can tell yours because the first slash is short and the last one very long. Nice bread to come home to for sure. You will be back to baking more of your favorites soon I am guessing.
Happy baking
I've long admired your extensive technical skills when it comes to SD/levain knowledge, as well as that of fresh whole berries and the like. But you just really impressed me with your eagle eye (although your typing skills are the polar opposite!). I have ALWAYS had the issue of equal distribution of scores down the length of a baguette whereby the final score tends to almost always be longer than the others. Bravo Sr. dbm!
My wife asked me if I thought that I'd make this again. As I do like the novelty of a double pre-ferment, especially in this case where it is a mix 'em and match 'em thang, I will. And I'll figure out how to sneak some further whole grain flours into the mix the next time.
As I keep the 75% levain ready at all hours all the time, I really only have to make the poolish in advance. As simple as they come. Even though the poolish was ready a half day earlier than I anticipated starting the mix, I care not. I do what I typically do with builds and pre-ferments. Pop them in the refrigerator when they mature and take them out when I need them. And therefore - as I've stated a number of times, I control the schedule rather than the other way around.
thanks, alan
does the typing. She is very fast with her 4 paws pounding away at light speed but she types poorly, in German, and Google has a hard time translating it sometimes. I try to go back and fix things later if I have time - and us retired folks need something to do. But time is short and being really lazy, I hate to do anything that remotely looks like work - and spell checking is too much work.
Eventually, we will all be trans humans anyway, living a virtual reality life, inside little black boxes on a spaceship heading who knows where in order to survive . No one will ever work, except inside their virtual world and all of us will know everything worth knowing that was ever known by anyone thanks to the the future cloud and Google. I bet that spelling and typing will suffer greatly then .....even when automatically spell checked by robots that will replace us all. There will be no one left in reality to care anyway so I say why care now? Still, I do need something to do.....I guess this is why I hardly ever hit the spell check button before posting.
It is good to know that you have developed a signature slash that only comes from making a lot of baguettes. No one else has yours and you can one day take it into your little lack box.
Happy baking Alan
the ankle-biter at work here - these beasts are nefariously poor typists. Your trans-human comment reminds me of the late 60's songs In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans and Everyone's Gone To The Moon by Jonathan King. ( I may be getting on in years myself, but sometimes the memory, especially for music, still kicks in.)
alan
I just don't know how you do it Alfanso. Just perfect!
Actually they are never quite that "red" when they finish baking. More like a combination of rust and browns. I also almost never use any flour on the top surface of the dough, as I proof them seam side down, with the dough only picking up a touch of raw flour from the couche. So that eliminates the tamping down on the color as well.
As with all things, seemingly, Mini was able to describe why they look so red. It seems to have something to do with the black background and the way that the camera lens and software interprets the two together.
And that is apparently how I "do it". So give it a try with snapping a few on a black background and seeing whether there is a bit of a color shift for you too. Mine is with an iPhone.
thanks, alan
Amazing looking baguettes! I'm still trying to improve my Tartine baguette. I'm curious how you achieve the steam while baking? And what do you bake the loaves on? Is it a stone, baguette pan, or inside a covered pan of some kind? Great job!
The baking surface is 1/4" flat unglazed Saltillo type tiles. The steam is a combination of both one loaf pan of Sylvia's Steaming Towel inserted into the preheated oven 15 minutes before the back, and one 9x13 casserole pan filled with lava rocks which get doused with ~2 cups of near boiling water just after the dough gets loaded. Plenty of references to both on TFL if you aren't familiar with them.
If you wish to view a 3 1/2 minute video I did on baking a similar baguette dough, click here where you can see both in action.
alan
Very nice indeed.
Its great that you put your own spin on the recipe, I like doing that too.
Happy baking
Ru
Yes, once I absorb the "original" formula, I like to change a thing to three and make it my own. A few are a bit closer to sacred, so I don't fuss with them too much, but they are all open to our own interpretation. Part of the fun indeed.
alan