alfanso's blog

My most recent bread comeuppance has been thanks to Msr. Calvel.  Someone recently posted a page from his book which had illustrations of differing bread forms and an accompanying table listing the features of each.  Well, it turns out that my "baguettes" are not even baguettes according to the man.  They match his characteristics of a "long batard": size, weight, shape and number of scores.  Waddya know?  Well, I'll still cheat a bit and continue to call them baguettes because I haven't noticed any bread police nearby to pinch me on this.

My wife is off to a Dragon Boat race this weekend.  I won't describe what it is, you can look it up if you have the mind to.  The three main things they do there are 1) race, 2) spend a lot of downtime between races and 3) eat and nap during the downtime.  I thought that I'd add to the groaning table by baking a rather, um, large golden raisin-pecan WW bread for them.

Apologies to, and inspiration by, Carole King.

Leviathan: Anything of immense size and power...

I had an urge to bake a monster "baguette".  Just for the fun of it.  Lacking any other reason, as if I needed one anyway.  Based on the Hamelman Pain au Levain w/WW & 60% hydration bread flour.  My version uses 125% hydration rye flour and eliminates the WW.

I included the full sized Fuji apple in the lead picture to provide a sense of size.  That's 22 inches or 59 cm.

Yesterday's bake was a dry run to see what's what.  Today corrections were made, and hopefully for the better.  This time I used a spring pan which had a slightly wider base than the Angel Food pan, and also employed a small bowl in the center in order to enlarge the hole in the crown.

But since it is "Italian bread", let's go with sesame semolina corona.  This is the Jeffrey Hamelman semolina dough with my 125% hydration rye liquid levain in lieu of his 125% bread flour liquid levain.

Pain Rustique as a batard and baguettes.  I've seen a few pain rustique posts come through recently.  Well maybe one, maybe more.  And it occurred to me that I hadn't made this before.  Being poolish based, it is a rare bake these days where I don't use a levain as my pre-ferment.

On May 1st BreadBabies posted her SJSD batard twins.  And they were lovely.  But her post started off with a lament on her rye levain.  After being built and "ready" her resultant bake yielded the comment "Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough was more like a Vermont pancake". 

Last week I posted my first run of the Hamelman Vermont SD as baguettes.  Quite happy with the results.  But a recent thread started by ifaey about problems with higher protein baguettes had me rethinking my own run.  

For as long as I've been an attendee at TFL University I continually see postings galore for both the Vermont SD and the Norwich SD.  Which, in an odd way, had me keep my distance from them both.  Until today.  Mr. Hamelman's Vermont SD is the first, foundational entry in his book's entire section of levain based breads, preceding even the venerable Pain au Levain entries.  I'd skipped over it before.