Doc, I hope I’m not imposing. I really would like to learn your method of shaping your mini-baguettes. To me they looks like very small batards (short & fat), but you are the Doc :-) If you say they are mini-baguettes, then mini-baguettes they must be. The shape is absolutely gorgeous!
I first saw them on this YouTube link. https://youtu.be/8kVab9PNhYM If anyone hasn’t seen this short video you are in for a giant treat!
Myself, and I’m sure others would like to know exactly how you preshape and shape these small beauties. IMO, they are definitely a work of art. Your YouTube video showing the evolution from limp dough to lovely eared masterpieces are real eye openers. Seeing is believing...
Danny
I am all eye's and " ears" too :) . My dough is ready - pain au levain - take 2 with some changes . I am prepared to shape a boul but learning this would be awsome for toomorow bake !
Thanks in advance,
Sorin.
Though at that scale the difference is not large. I think the ones in the video are 240g each, and I don't think I have any photos of shaping, but it is really not different from anything else except that it is easier at that size to get the tapered tails. Practice, practice, practice is all I can say. Well developed dough, bulk fermented long enough, divide and pre-shape with care then let them rest for 12-15 min covered with linen and plastic. A good pre-shape is important because you don't want to fold it more than twice at final shaping. There are lots of people on this site who are much better than I am at making pretty loaves.
The hardest thing to get right for that video was the camera fixture (hot-glued corrugated cardboard that hangs on the oven door, trimmed with a carpet knife) and the lighting (20W goose-neck halogen desk lamp attached to a tripod and aimed through the oven window to minimize glare and glint). And as you might guess, it was the third attempt that proved to be good enough to see the phenomenology of the opening slash. The camera was an iPhone 5, and it was post-processed with iMovie.
Can you provide links for the preshaping and shaping of the dough? The goal of a baguette seems to be a consistent level cylinder. I am assuming this is not the case with your's.
Are you able to shape those with higher hydration dough?
What is your best hydration for shaping this style?
How do you get those graduated (sloping) points? Those are super fine...
You wrote, "There are lots of people on this site who are much better than I am at making pretty loaves." That may be the case, but I haven't discovered anyone that shapes a bread quite like those. They are unique. "Baker's Hands" par excellence...
Danny
69% hydration is about as high as I can go and still shape reasonably well. Open crumb suffers at lower numbers and handling properties suffer at higher values. But it depends a lot on your specific flour.
My standard batch is 27% prefermented flour in a 100% hydration levain that is fermented at ~82°F for >12 hrs (has lost [as CO2] >2% of the weight of the flour added to the levain); 69% final dough hydration, 20 min autolyse, almost fully develop the gluten (leaving some margin so that you can handle it to achieve the shape you want). 1:15 bulk ferment; divide/preshape; rest 10-15 min; final shape with long tails and at least 2" diameter at the widest point; proof 1:15 to 2:30; retard for a minimum of 45 min to facilitate an easy slash; bake hot so that it gets good color before it dries out (with steam for 5-10 min). Typical sizes are 120g, 240g, or 500g.
Thank you Doc, i have more questions, i am a trully begginer in baking breads : after autolyse you mix the dough by hand or machine? If by hand you do slap and folds or mix in a bowl? by " allmost " fully develop gluten which tests you perform? windowpane? or just by feeling...smoothness.... Do you think increasing glutten development from middle to allmost fully crust , may be thinner? Or increasing steaming? After you stop steam injection you proceed to convection and lower the temp or continue with no fan assisted heating? My best results was with steam injection 15 min 230C, top and bottom heat - no fan - 15 min 230C and then 10 minutes convection lowering temp with 15-20C.
Sorry if i bother you with so many questions.
Thanks,
Sorin.
I discovered after a LOT of trials and watching a lot of YouTube videos that for me the best way to judge gluten development was to watch the surface of the dough as it mixes. As it develops you will see little balls of dough show up on the surface as it is mixed. If you wait long enough, they will get smaller and eventually the dough will be totally smooth (after it has pulled off the side of the mixing bowl). If it gets to totally smooth you have fully developed the gluten and if you continue mixing it will eventually go slack. If you stop when it gets completely smooth, bulk ferment, then gently shape into something that is not too complicated, it will work well. But if you divide and pre-shape and then come back and final shape such that the combination of the two puts too much shear into the dough, then it will tear and you just can't ever get the surface to tighten up again (at least I can't).
I mix by machine. By hand I think it is close to impossible to over mix. A window pane test is the minimum you should be able to do, but be reminded that for every flour/hydration/fat combination the end point is a little different.
Until you have a flour you have confidence in (KA bread flour is very good and very consistent so you can use it as a reference) and know how to mix it properly to develop the gluten, you are pretty much wasting your time on all of the other details (beyond just following instructions). Judging gluten development and judging proofing are the sort of basic things you need to master. Watch every YouTube bread baking video you can find so that you begin to understand what is different between bakers. You don't have to do what they do but you have to do something comparable. I wish TFL had been around earlier. I would have perhaps made fewer mistakes along the way.
Doc, when you wrote, “As it develops you will see little balls of dough show up on the surface as it is mixed“. Are the little balls of dough formed by partially unhydrated flour? If you squeeze them do they feel little small peas suspended in the dough?
This is of interest, because I have a hard time mixing (by hand) the flour and water for autolyse. I never seems to get all of the flour equally hydrated. In an attempt to equally hydrate I think the dough may be over developing for autolyse. I am shooting for the “shaggy mass”. I am not sure I am getting this right.
I’ve tried sifting flour, adding flour slowly to the water, adding water slowly to the flour, and every other thing I could think of. At this time I have no perfect solution.
Dan
They are not dry flour. I think they are isolated bits of more developed dough that have not yet been merged into longer strands or large sheets. Sort of like rubber bands that have snapped and contracted back to their minimum length. Eventually they get connected and all stretch together forming a smooth surface that continues to slide over itself and reform bonds with adjacent strands/sheets.
The problem with specifying "gluten development" is that there is no accepted measurement or test that produces a quantitative result. So that leaves it up the the baker to discover what indications can be used to reliably judge when mixing is done. In a production environment, mixing time and process control become proxies for a baker's historic judgement. In one of the King Arthur videos, Hamelman adds a few ounces of water to what is probably 80 lbs of dough because it looks like it needs it. I would suggest that getting to that point takes a lot of cycles.
I am looking through some old videos to see if I can find some clips that are relevant. But until that yields a result, here is a frame that illustrates what I am talking about (this is a batch of 65% hydration dough that is somewhere in the middle of being mixed):
A "shaggy mass" is just wet flour. I suspect that if you sift the flour to eliminate lumps before you add the liquid (all at once), then mix with your hand, or a wooden spoon, or with a silicone scraper until there aren't any obvious dry spots or pooled water, then you are ready to autolyse. Water will migrate to the dry spots that you don't see and by the end of 20-30 min the flour will be uniformly wet.
I don't think you can over-mix prior to autolyse so long as you don't add the salt until after autolyse is completed. While biochemical action happens during autolyse, I don't think that was the original intent. Most likely it was a way for a baker to reduce the amount of work he (or perhaps she) had to do. Somebody figured out that it took less effort to complete mixing if the dough was allowed to fully absorb the water before starting to knead. Later somebody asked why and discovered that gluten development would happen on its own and even later some scientist discovered that it took some time for the yeast to build the structures that it needed to replicate and that by withholding the salt, that process went faster. Then somebody retrospectively justified autolyse on these other factors. If you don't have a mixer or choose not to use one, then you get all of the benefit of autolyse. If you have a mixer and choose to use it, I suspect there is very little advantage. But if somebody has an experiment that can demonstrate quantitatively an advantage to autolyse, then I want to know about it so that I can repeat it.
but the Doctor is correct. "A good pre-shape is important because you don't want to fold it more than twice at final shaping". The shaping is modeled after Martin Phillip's technique from the King Arthur shaping video. The only difference is the size of the dough.
I see that I never posted these as a blog entry back in Feb, 2017, coincidentally just a month before Doc posted his video. But truth be told, these are no harder and maybe easier to shape than a full sized batard. If you can do those, you can do these.
If I recall these are all 250g.
Doc or Alan, when you caution not to fold the dough more than twice, are you talking about the procedure where you put your thumb into the dough and fold it over with your index finger? After that the dough is sealed with the palm of the hand.
Why is it crucial to not fold more than twice. I am curious to know.
As far as Doc’s shaping, how do you position your hands to roll the dough so that the taper runs from the middle all the way to each end. What I am presently trying is to push towards the middle with both hands from each side. Is the preshape a uniform round cylinder like a typical baguette.
I’m going to check out the KA video. The shape Doc consistently gets is unique and I am drawn to it.
Thanks.
Dan
and I'll make the assumption that Doc's is done the same way - aren't shaped as a typical baguette. Rather as a batard. If you watch the video you will see what I mean.
There are 50 ways to shape a batard, but this is the way that I do it. Not necessarily right for the next person, but I find it works well for me.
For those interested in the Batard shaping video, it can be viewed here. https://youtu.be/PmxDKuGLWuE The Batard session starts at 6:28
Dan
The batard always has to have a bigger belly and that is achieved by what is referred to in the video as bringing the shoulders across to put more dough in the middle. And if you have over-developed the gluten you won't have the nice relaxed result that you can extend easily. It will fight you and pull back.
Try dividing the dough into 120g pieces so that you get lots of trials per batch. A 120g roll is a serving size batard (~100g after baking) and you can mix a batch of 12 (1440g) in a small KitchenAid mixer and they will fit onto two 1/2-sheet pans.
Other things that matter: dough texture and the surface you are shaping on and how much flour you have on the surface and on your hands. It is very easy to have too much flour on the surface. I like to use an inverted full-sheet-size silicone baking mat on a slick countertop with a couple of drops of water underneath to get it to stay in place. Then a minimal amount of flour on the surface. Most of us don't have laminated maple counters as work surfaces. I have seen people shape on granite and stainless steel but I don't have the skill. And for your surface there is probably an optimum dough hydration.
I clipped this out of a video so the resolution suffers, but you can see the shape that produces the end product (and in the background you can see a prior batch post bake). The shaping process is pretty close to what is shown in the King Arthur video. But alfanso is the master of shaping so we should probably look for some prior post where he has exposed his craft. As he points out, this is just one way to do it.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. And for this beholder, your mini-batards are among the most beautiful breads that these eyes have ever beheld.
In my opinion they are perfection personified.
I would be exuberant if some day in the future, I develop the skill set necessary to produce that shaped bread.
Dan
...and would you believe, I’m not a fan of football :-)
You will get there. Maybe sooner than you think.
Retirement has the benefit of allowing you to really focus on what you want to accomplish.
Doc
Dan
Just scale it up.