Gave croissants another try. Definitely getting better at them.
I messed up and didn't have milk on hand when making the dough, so I substituted water and milk powder. I was eating some plain whole yogurt at the time and decided to toss some of that in too!
I used a new butter for this, a European-style 83% butterfat one.
These are two Tartine-style country loaves.
Used the same formula as I have before, found here http://www.theperfectloaf.com/best-sourdough-recipe/
This past week, I tried txfarmer's Poolish Croissants again with great success. This time I used Kerrygold butter and all King Arthur bread flour. I had to let the dough relax a couple times to be able to roll it out, but was able to get really nicely defined layers.
Ok, I've been posting a lot.. but I'm just too excited about this loaf. This is everything I'm looking for in a sourdough loaf. I roughly used the recipe at theperfectloaf.com
I used significantly more levain than he called for cause I had it leftover from making Ken Forkish's field blend #1 (see pictures below) so I decided to use it in a mostly white "pure" sourdough loaf. What a cool feeling to leaven purely with wild yeast!
Well, here's my very first sourdough loaf! I've had the starter going for a couple of weeks now. Started with a 100% rye one and then forked it off into a 100% bread flour one. I had a kinda unusual time table for this loaf.
Built levain at around 4:30pm. Let that rise for 6 hours in a warm oven (pan with hot water in it)
Alright, so this is Hamelman's Country Bread (50% preferment).
To me these two loaves look really over shaped. The cross sections would be far rounder than I think is appropriate. Also, the scoring to me looks as if it needs to be far deeper (I was trying to get ears and boy this is far from that!).
Can you help me diagnose what went wrong here?
I think I'm finally getting the hang of the shallow scoring at a low angle. I love the gradient of light to dark I'm getting on the batard. And even some blistering from the several hours in the fridge..
This was using Hamelman's Country Bread recipe (with the 50% pre-ferment)
This was my third time attempting croissants. I used txfarmer's adjusted recipe but I used bread flour instead of the AP suggested. I was really going after those thin layers, the honeycomb, etc.
Unfortunately I didn't have access to a higher quality, high fat, european-style butter, so I tried the "beat some flour into the butter" method. Not sure if this helped or not, but I imagine it helped absorb some of the water from the butter I used, also helping it to plasticize more easily.
I've made Ken Forkish's White Bread with Poolish several times, but this was my first time attempting his 80% Biga. This dough was incredible! So bouncy and full of life!
Unfortunately, because I've yet to get any bannetons, I'm still using a cloth lined bowl/cloth on the counter. This time, although I floured the cloths (with what I thought was) very heavily, both batards stuck to them, and there was some tearing when putting the loaf on the peel.
