French Baguette

Looking good Bill ! If I may offer a couple of suggestions.

My straight dough (yeast only) baguettes (and I make a lot of them) use 0.4% dry active yeast. I don't know your experience but that amount is expressed as a percentage of the total flour, or what is called "Baker's Math". This particular formula comes from Jeffrey Hamelman and I have made it many, many times. You are using 2.2% yeast which would be nearly 6 times the amount of yeast I would use. This is going to cause some problems.

First, looking at my formula and scaling it to be similar to your formula, my poolish would contain 0.2 g. of yeast, not 4.0 g. My final mix would contain an additional 2.9 g. of yeast, not 11 g. All that extra yeast, even it were sluggish, would be accelerating your fermentation beyond any reasonable degree of control. With that acceleration, and looking at your time table, the dough would certainly be overproofed and that shows in your pictures. No offense intended as I still overproof at times too.

While your scores are opening they are not peeling back, creating the grigne (ears) that are characteristic of the baguette. That generally points to a few things, one being overproofing. Another reason is a lack of steam, although an active oven spring with a lack of steam usually creates a blowout somewhere else in the loaf, and I do not see any blowouts in your picture. 

The next concern is your baking temperature. The hotter the baking surface the faster the expansion in the dough (oven spring). This fast expansion pushes dough vertically and in combination with the expansion points you made with your scores, creates the classic opening and grigne. My baking surface is 260C for baguettes and I am baking on a 3.8 cm. thick stone.

Lastly I might recommend a different scoring technique. While I too started by creating my scores in the direction of the end result, I was taught by professionals to score parallel with the length of the baguette. When scoring create about a 20 - 30% overlap of the last score, about 10 mm. away. Do this 4 or 5 times until your scores go from end to end. This method will provide the best opportunity for grigne. The best baguettes, after baking, have uniform scoring with a small band of unscored dough between the openings, and an impressive grigne.

I hope this helps you to perfect your baguettes.

review and attend to David Snyder's scoring tutorial,  His updated version is http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/31887/scoring-bread-updated-tutorial.

It is a skill that will take a lot of practice for all but the naturals out there.

Shiny baguettes are a foreign concept to me. I make other breads with shiny surfaces, like challah and braided fruit breads, but I have never come across a baguette with and egg wash. Looking at your picture I'd say that they are somewhat shiny now - more so than others I have seen.

Typically the couche is lightly floured and then the shaped baguettes are placed inside, seam side up. When it is time to get them into the oven they are flipped over (seam side down now) and the flour adheres to the top surface. When scored then baked you get a nice contrast between the remaining floured surface and the freshly exposed internal dough that has expanded through the score points.

When I make baguettes I am not shooting for a shiny surface. Egg wash and steam are not a concept I would undertake so I cannot offer you any suggestions on how to accomplish both. I apologize if I confused you.

Scoring - let's make believe you were only going to make one score from end to end. You would start at one end and run your blade the length of the baguette. Using that imagery, consider doing the same thing but breaking the single score into 4 or 5 sections. In order to do this with some degree of overlap you would have to score at a slight angle. My angles are closer to 10 degrees than 45 degrees. This is the point I was trying to make.

Both two amazing bakers. Jim summarized everything and pointed out yeast quanties which you you can fo a tad lower (just to emphasize how little is needed). Also glad to hear someone else foes to 500f (260c) for temp (i actually push to 515f to account for hwat loss opening doors and such). So in general Jim summed it all up in one post as for scores jist check out alans work - far out stuff. Never heard of a shiny baguette in fact theres an old thread here where two members did a flour swap one being a french woman who upon baking for the first time using king arthir flour remarked how odd it was that her bread looked like plastic as it came out shiny - that being the unwanted result so, if you really want shiny at least we knlw that KA flour may help - warning ahe also mentioned the bread was flavorless. Seeing that you have T65, you probably have a challenge getting a sheen (most bakers in usa cant even get T65 - I go to extensive effort to obtain it, its like baking gold here)

mukgling just posted a video how to make No Knead Baguette at Home, using Lodge combo cooker. Due to the size of combo cooker, it's mini baguette :) , not the full size. However, her method might be easy to achieve crunch crust and open crumb at home.

The crust shine you want on your baguettes is from starch gelatinization in the presence of sufficient humidity. Your photo shows a dull crust that, AFAIK, is always caused by inadequate steaming during the first part of the bake. So, you need to find another way of steaming your oven.

Do you have an electric or a gas oven? Gas ovens vent so well that humidifying them is a real challenge. Baking the loaves covered is the best solution. Alfanso has another method, and I'd ask him to describe it. I have an electric oven and use a cast iron skillet filled with lava rocks. I preheat that and then place a perforated pie tin filled with ice cubes on top of the lava rocks just before loading the loaves.

Happy baking!

David