My first satisfactory baguette

Hi folks, 

I wanted to start my blog with a succesful bake :D. Don't be fooled though... I've been baking for the past 2 years, and this is the first baguette I am satisfied with. Comparatively to past baguettes, the biggest success of this bread were the 'grignes', or 'ears'. This was fruit of several improvements:

1) scoring technique improved; scoring is really difficult to practice because being a weekend baker I only get one opportunity to do it per week. I spend the whole week thinking 'almost vertical, parallel to the main axis, don't slash accross, vertical, remember, vertical', only to finally reach the moment and slash accross again... Another improvement in technique was that I was always reading 'slash at a 30 degree angle', and misunderstanding it thinking it means 30 degrees in relation to the vertical height line of the bread, and not to the horizontal one... Slashing at the right angle allows the cut to open more slowly, which protects the soft inner dough for longer, allowing it to rise more dramatically when its time comes.

2) big steam bonus; at home I bake at a small electrical oven, that has no bottom rack. So I line two pyrexes with hot wet towels at the single rack, and put the baking tray on top of them. But this time I baked at my sister's oven, a proper gas oven with a decent size and 2 racks. I placed my usual 2 hot towels on the bottom, along with a cast iron baking tray where I poured boiling water just after loading. The cast iron in the tray represents an improvement in relation to aluminum trays I used before. It retains heat better, so steam continues to be emitted for longer after pouring the hot water.

3) new "french bread pan", as seen in the photo. Purists will dislike this, but I really liked this tray. It doesn't stick, it holds the bread properly during proofing (I have an improvised thin linen couche that hasn't quite done the work so far), and it exposes the bread better to the steam. I don't have a baking stone (no baking stone fits my small home oven), so this pan was a nice solution.

Some still persistent problems are:

1) final shaping; I think I got the pre-shaping part right, but the final shaping is still a little in the dark. I'm too scared of flattening the dough too much and driving all the air out. So as I didn't flatten enough the dough into a rectangle, the bread is not properly cylindrical.

2) Crumb; crumb was not bubbly enough nor soft. This kind of conflicts with the information above that I was too wary of degassing too much during shaping. Maybe longer bulk fermentation/final proofing was needed?

3) not letting steam out for long enough; after 10 minutes I removed the steamers, and waited for the crust to form. The crust took very long to form, north of 20 minutes... even so the bread is still a bit pale. For this reason, the crumb got too long to cook, which also explains the harder crumb. I think the reason was that the oven became very moist with all the steam, and needed a little more time opened to get rid of more steam.

The recipe:

Poolish

150g AP flour

120g water

1g yeast

Dough

150g AP flour

80g water

4g salt

1g yeast

Poolish rested for 14 hours. Final dough mixed by hand for 5 minutes, done 4 sets of stretch and fold in 45 minute intervals, pre-shaped as torpedos and bench-rested for 10 minutes, shaped as baguettes and proofed in the pan, covered with a cloth for 45 minutes. Baked at 250 degrees for 10 minutes with steam, 10 minutes without.