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Croissants - another half a step of half a step

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Super quick bake after a few loaves of bread. Prep'd the lamination in about 10 minutes this morning mostly to experimwnt with a hotter oven (bumped 425f to 450f) as well as baking on stone with parchment instead of a pan. Noticed much better pop amd the results speak for themselves. Although far from great, the inner portion of the spirals has opened much more and beginning to see the beautiful spiral 'honeycomb' materializing.

What no runt ?

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All loaves shaped up pretty nicely. Ok so this is just another usual bake nothing special, no levain or anything fancy just a bake to make sure not to 'lose it' ... As one wise tfler reminds us, 'if you don't use it you lose it' - most exciting part here is that I usually have one loave considerable malformed which has been convenient at least for choosing a crumb model for disection but today the question becomes which one of you goes to the lab for analysis ?

Croissants take a half step forward

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Quick snap of one of 6 croissants baked today that are showing signs of improvement. Firat few attempts at these yeilded sandwich bread style crumb and now slowly seeing better and better results with the occasional step backwards. This bake invokved a change up whereby I decided that in order to improve the crumb, I needed to find a way to deliver more heat to these guys and did so by baking directly on the stone (well almost with a single layer of parchment).

Starter seems ready

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Been nursing 3 new starters for almost 3 weeks now and at least one seems like its reaching a goos maturity level. This was a quick test bake to evaluate proofing times and although the crumb appears to have developed nicely i sti have a bit of work in determining optimal proofing times. Last week i clearly overproofed and therefore decided to try the other end of the spectrum (a really short final ... Ie 45 minutes as opposed to 2 hours).

Levain baguettes first bake from new starter

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Heres the first bake from week old starter - results ehhhm, just ok. These seem fairly over proofed or the starter needs to mature more. Having been on a long commercial yeast kick its quite a change of pace using natural yeast whos timing and quantities I've gotten down to minutes. The first major adjustment is dealing with the long bulk and temperature sensitity. I usually cold retard over night and see about 1.5 time rise followed by a quick final. Here I let the dough rise at about 76f for 12+ hours and saw a good rise to near double size.

Might that be a sourdough starter

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Sitting beside these 3 baguettes, why yes it is but before anyone rushes to judgment these are my usual schtick of yeasted loaves. Just wanted to advertise the fact that this starter is now mature enough to start baking more natural yeasted loaves. This is really a shout out to alfanso so he knows they are on the way. Was hoping last week the starter would be ready but it was just too young (just a week old).

A nice canele surprise

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Its been a while since I baked these delicious morsels and spent a good deal of watching niko triantafillou's super quick video (found here https://www.saveur.com/how-to-make-canele). As a self proclaimed obsessive he already holds tons of credit and then watch his video (kiss fingers mmmma!) Just beautiful. So this time i decided its time to go all the way - vanilla beans instead of extract and gee instead of butter in the beeswax mix. Oh and 36 hours rest instead of 12.

In search of

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The picture perfect loaf. After a couple of disappointments ie, full on overproof last week and slightly entering the overproof zone yesterday, I figure it's time to cpncentrate again. This time shavint 5 minutes off the final and remembering my own tips on scoring. Its so easy to forget. Pretty nice loaves today !

A post FTR

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Posting just for the record. Went ever so slightly into the over proof zone again. Not quite the pop I like but still pretty decent stuff. This formula calls for 0.8% fresh yeast which for 600g flour mean 4-5g of yeast. This is a real pain to measure and thinking back of both the noticable high rise in the morning and thinking about measuring I may have added 7-8g which is easy to do if your scale doesnt do 10ths of a gram. I often notice that I can weigh the same small amount twice and have two readings differing by up to 2g.

Laminates starting to comply

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Objective today was to improve on some former efforts to achieve a more open crumb with croissants etc. Unfortunately as i began dough prep last night I was almost out of the flour I have been using and, have discovered works nicely for the lamination process (francine bio t55). This makes a really great dough that glutenizes beaitifully just not a great bread flour as its missing some af the additives (malts etc) - this is straight flour at about 9.4% protein. So only having about 250g left for a 500g batch I, added the other 250 as gold medal AP.
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