kendalm's blog

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.

Three mini croissants made with some extra dough from the weekend that I had sitting frozen in the freezer. Some positive signs of open crumb ! Too bad the picture is a bit blurry. Originally I was getting ready to toss the dough as i got off to a false start over the weekend and mixed some ADY with chilled water finding only after mixing that the yeast had not dissolved (dough ball spotted with freckles of undissolved yeast). Instead I started another batch and let the first warm to RT and then hand kneaded until the freckles disappeared, split into halves and froze the tosser.

Well dangit, pretty bad weekend for baking. Not sure if it was a symptom of being really busy and trying to fit a morning ritual into evenings but I thought I would post this failure as a good illistration of overproofing and, what's so interesting about this disaster is that we get to see overproffing in progress and also drive home the point that it happens lightning fast. Since i often bake three loaves at a time and usually at a predictable temperature in the morning, I began this bake in the evening at a point when tempabwere a bit lower.

In an attempt to better understand laminated pastry spring I am today left even more confused. If you take note of the two (really sad looking) pain aux chocolates the one on the left proofed for about 2.5 hours whereas the one on right proofed for 3.5-4 hours - both from the same dough under the same conditions (about 72f). In an attemot to figure out timing and oven temps to achieve maximum rise I intentionally tried baking several, actually 4 bakes from the same dough and expected the longer the proof, the greater the rise.

Wait for the crumb !

As we all know, progress is not made without setbacks. A few weeks ago I did croissants and saw more separation of layers and got really excited. On top of the visual improvement, the eating experience was also significantly improved. So, trying to recall what I did on thay bake and trying to replicate, layers barely separated - real bummer. Tried using the same butter and other ingredients but for some reason it just wasnt the same or better. The frustrating part about a new project like this is not havong enough experience to both know and guage progress during each phase.

So the plan was to do a sourdough bake this week but realized the starter hadnt been fed in a while thanks to a lot of travelling. Dropping this as usual bake today - emphasis on shaping and finding it easier and easier to get straighter loaves as can be seen here 2 of 3 came out really nice and runt of course is the crumb model. Just crazy how a little deformity in cylinder shapes is increased in thr final and goes to show how tricky it is to get nice appealing long full size baguettes (each of these btw are always 350g wet and about 270g baked and 54-55cm in length)

To an extent I'm now pretty content with basic loaf baking and find myself craving pastires more. Its funny how this obsession arose after finally giving up trying to find a baguette in usa that tastes like the real deal and finally figure well why not just learn how bake the darn things myself (this is typical behavior for me btw as ive countless other replications of foods that can only be found wherever it was they were invented - take the famous lebanese kanafe for example - wow ! what a treat).

Recently there's been a few posts mentioning the 10,000 loaf benchmark and since I have been keeping rough track of how many baguettes Ive baked in the 1.5 years its seems about time to officially call it 1,000. So this is about what one can expect thisbfar in and hopefully some of the things I have learned can help reduce the number of times other baguette enthusiasts have to weather through to get a decent loaf. Hardest part so far has been getting that nice cylinder shape and in this case the middle loaf really came together well this time.