I was in my building's management office on Wed. afternoon. The building's Chief Engineer said that he had to discuss something serious with me. "I want you to make me another one of those olive breads" he said with all seriousness. Who was I to refuse? "Baguette or batard?" "Baguette." "See you on Friday" was my reply.
415g x 4 baguettes
The formula:
Notes:
No, that isn't my batard.
During our recent visit to my brother and wife in Albuquerque, their home baker friend, having seen my postings on TFL asked if I could give him a baking lesson. Just in case, I also packed up everything to make a few batches of SJSD batards. Everything except the kitchen sink and my baking deck, that is.
Since picking up those 20#s of semola rimacinata from Laurenzo's, I've been on a semolina baguette tear. After baking a bunch of baguettes and batards for the Laurenzo's I've had a few more bakes. Mostly out of want (wont?), or is that desire? Dunno. But I've moved the dial a bit. Instead of my typical 350g - 375g baguettes, I bumped them up to be "gros baguettes" - big boys weighing in 100g heavier each. So all of these weigh in at about 450g-475g.
A trip down to that fabulous Italian grocery store, Laurenzo's, a week ago to pick up more durum flour. 20 lbs. in three buckets, because a 50 lb. bag is just way out of my league.
The owner asked if I was making pasta. No, bread. After some shop talk and few snapshots, he said that his dad would love some of the sesame semolina. Could I bake some for him? Why, yes. And I added an olive levain to boot, just for fun.
Last week I tried my hand at the Hamelman Semolina Levain bread with 125% bread flour liquid levain. With semolina coarse grain #1 used instead of the powdery durum, for experimentation. And it worked out, mostly just fine. But the flavor just wasn't grabbing me. Hence take 2 here has a few changes, while keeping everything else the same.
rushyama recently posted a beautiful semolina sesame levain. Kismet, but that isn't what had me geared up for this bake. It had already been earmarked as my next bake.
For this bread, a search of TFL yields one clear use of semolina coarse #1 way way back. This specific bread in baguette form? Only David Snyder seemed to make it. Mixed by hand? Who knows, but probably not many if any.
Hamelman Olive Levain Baguettes redux.
What happens when I get inattentive during a step. In this case, the seam wasn't sealed tightly on this one, or more likely didn't go on the baking peel seam side down. Or both! Fortunately these are few and far between. It will still be a tasty treat.
From the top angle view - all seems to be dandy. This time I used better quality olives so the taste should be improved as well as upped the hydration by about 2-3%. I really can't say with any accuracy, I just added a few extra grams of water.
SFBI style pain au levain at 80% hydration.
Not my style, and too lazy, I guess. Earlier this week SteveB posted his magnificent 80% hydration pain au levain, which disappeared all too quickly from the current Bread Browser images. I'd been making a few different versions, including my take on David Snyder's take on an SFBI pain au levain.
I did my due diligence searching for anyone who had made this bread either without using a mixer or had made this as baguettes. My search came up empty on both accounts. So it was high time to take the plunge. This is my first bake from Mr. Hamelman's book, although I did bake two of his pain au levain breads from formulae posted by someone somewhere on the Web. This bread has a combination of castelvetrano and kalmata olives.
