I always get rubber-like crusts.

Hello,

I have tried lots of different recipes for bread, of multiple types: french bread, whole bread, whole and rye bread, with different hydrations (60% - 75% for normal flour, 70% - 80% for whole flour) but in all of my finished products, i always get a chewy, rubber-like crust. The crumb is also a bit too dense, and sometimes a bit sticky.

In my pizzas (65% to 75% hydration), i always either get a hard crust with a hint of browning (baked at max setting (<250°C (482°F))) or a pizza a soft crust and no browning at all (baked at 180°C (352°F), both in a static oven (not ventilated).

What i'm trying to achieve is a crisp "red" crust with an open crumb (baguette-like), without using enrichments.

In my most recent bread (and the best i made so far), after letting the bread cool down i got a slightly chewy but very crisp crust, which after 2 hours lost all of its crispness and after some more hours became a rubber-like crust.

Here is its recipe:

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Summary: Baguettes with Poolish, Tipo '0 flour,  ~65% Hydration.

Poolish:

• 120g Flour (Tipo '0 flour with 12.1g of protein content, which in the US is unbleached bread flour i guess?)
• 120g Water
• 0.12g Fresh Compressed Yeast

Bread:

• Poolish
• 276g Flour
• 138g Water
• 1.8g Fresh Compressed Yeast
• 7.8g Salt

(Weird quantities because i scaled down a recipe, both in baguettes length and quantity. Everything is 12% of the original quantity).

Process:

Mix (frasage) the ingredients of the poolish, and then leave it overnight, covered.

(17h later, i let it a bit too long, the poolish started to collapse, but not too much)

Mix (frasage) all the ingredients and the poolish, then let it rest for 10/15 minutes to hydrate evenly.

Slap and fold, incorporating air until i get a dough that passes the windowpane test (25 minutes).

-- At this point i have a soft, elastic dough, which when i slap it bounces a bit.

I let the dough rest for 1h30m.

I divided the dough in equal parts, made small loaves, let them rest for ~10m, then elongated them by rolling, and put them to rise on a cloth, one next to the other separated by folding that cloth. The usual baguette shaping, basically.

I now let them rise for about 1h30m.

In the meantime i preheated the oven at 240°C (464°F) with a baking stone in and a steel pan on the bottom.

I then slashed the baguettes, put them on the stone all together and filled the pan with boiling water.

I baked them for 25 minutes, static (not ventilated), then let them cool down vertically on a rack.

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I noticed later that they were too close to the top heater because the top of the baguettes was brown while the sides were not. Maybe i didn't preheat the oven for long enough, either. Not sure, but i doubt it's the cause of the problem, because i get the rubbery crust even when i get a really nice colour on my bread.

I think i am doing something wrong during baking, but i don't know where my misunderstanding is.

Thanks for taking your time to read.