This week I made the dough for Hamelman's baguettes with poolish yet again. This time, instead of making three 11-13 inch baguettes, scaled at 250g, I made one 750g loaf. Since the 250g baguettes would be called demi-baguettes, clearly this was a mega-baguette. Clearly.
Okay, fine, I made a batard and scored it like a baguette. Still it came out pretty nicely.
Crust Crackles, too!
I do believe I am closing in on my goal of a tasty, presentable and above all reliable baguette, folks. At the very least, the results have been reliably tasty of late, which will do for a start!
Anyway, here was last week's bake. Still a lot of bursting between cuts despite loading the steam pans a couple minutes before loading the loaves. Great ears though.
Exterior
One of my favorite breads from Hamelman's Bread is Pain Rustique (comes right before "Country Bread" and "Rustic Bread"). The bread is unshaped like a ciabatta, although it only has 69% hydration, and is scored before baking. When I get it right (as opposed to, say, forgetting the salt and yeast following the autolyse, as I did the first time I tried the formula), it produces a toothsome crust and a flavorful, moderately open crumb.
Well, dear readers, despite my recent silence on the subject I have not given up on my baguette quest! For the last few weeks, however, I'd gotten a little sick of blogging about it. This week was fairly successful, however, and so I want to share, and request some feedback.
My family is not so much in to football, but we are into bread. This post will give you an idea how much. You see, my mom taught me the basics of making bread when I was a kid. However, she never went much beyond a basic white bread pan loaf (although these were always excellent). Although I got her The Bread Baker's Apprentice for Christmas a couple years back, she never got into the artisan baking thing, with pre-ferments and all, and found the whole process a little intimidating.
With all this talk on the forum about miche lately, I've been itching to give it a try. So when the excellent dmsnyder posted the formula for the miche he made in the SFBI Artisan II workshop, I decided that the time was now and the bread should be here!
I never got around to posting last week, but I did get around to making yet another batch of poolish baguettes. The only real change was to use King Arthur All-Purpose flour in the final dough (making up 2/3 of the total flour with the Bread Flour in the poolish). Also, thinking that my lame was getting dull, I tried scoring with the other side of the blade (switching from "Method 1" to "Method 2" as dmsnyder terms them). I wasn't enturely impressed with the results.
Results: Exterior
I'm still at it. We were at my parents' place on Saturday (Christmas day), and while I did end up baking a batch of Italian bread for Christmas dinner, there were no baguettes. But we got home Saturday night, and I actually felt in the mood for baguettes. I made up the poolish, increasing the yeast slightly from last week so it would ripen before late afternoon, and sunday I made yet another batch of the Hamelman Baguettes with Poolish.
If you've been following this series of posts, you might be wondering, "what happened to week 11?" Well, last Saturday my mother in law invited us over for a Chrismas cookie baking day. I was distressed at the notion of missing my regular baguette bake, and foolishly decided to mix the dough at home, then bring the dough with me and bake it at my in-laws. Long story short, it did not go well. Moving on.
