kendalm's blog

Now this is the way I like my crumb to turn out ! Not going to bother posting any shaping pics because as it always seems to be the case that a nicely shaped loaf will suffer internally and vice versa ... Such is the quest right now to perfect both shape and crumb at the same time. A few points to note - I've always added a pinch of soy flour to my recipe but this time I decided to go with the recommended dose which is max 0.25% (actually I did more like .2%) and wow what a difference this makes to the dough.

2 ok looking baguettes and a funky batard. FTR after running out of my favorite flour moulin d'auguste and while waiting patiently for the next shipment I raided my pantry and used 50/50 blend of central milling t70 with bobs red mill bread and came up with this. Was kind of surprised by the extra wide open crumb which is quite pleasing. Shaping was pretty much as expected with more stretching than burst however the most apparent difference is the flavor.

Oh %*#&@ what happenned to my oven Are we allowed to swear here ? Today I immediately thought of this vid (see 1:10) as it took 30 minutes to bake these loaves. https://youtu.be/_2A-Wj4cG0A Per yesterdays post I am experimenting with trying to get nicely browned ears and for whatever reason waiting a bit longer to build up heat seems to have had the reverse effect. So no wonderfully presentable ears but pretty decent loaves otherwise. Scoring looked spot on before shutting the door.

Well so far this week shaping and scoring has been good but not fantastic. A few weeks ago about 6 minutes into my bake I peeked in a saw every score line developing perfectly. At the end of the bake they came out with beautiful browned ears and could be been on a postcard. This picture above is what I consider now to be sort of average with good bloom and burst but now just trying to figure out what went right last time. As far as I can tell one very important factor is getting as much heat into and around the loaf in the first 5 minutes.

Here's a quick pic of today's bake. Recently I have shifted focus to all three (at least of my) important criterion in baking a great loaf that is, good flavor, a nice open crumb structure and somewhat presentable final shape. When o first started trying baguettes it seemed that only one of these was near impossible. So here's today's batch - great taste considering the bulk was only 6 hours. As a side-note, used thawed fresh yeast which I am beginning to notice is really active even more so that fresh yeast that was never frozen.