Another run at Baguettes

Profile picture for user TomK

I repeated last week’s bake of 36+hour Baguettes, overall hydration at 74% this time. The shaping went much better and although I thought the scoring was easier the cuts didn’t open up as well as I hoped.

Type 70 flour, proofed en couch and transferred to the stone by flipboard. 4 Demi-baguettes, 15” long, 250 grams dough weight each. Baked with hot water on lava rocks for steam in the first half of the bake. It’s a good challenge and there’s always a reason to do it again! I need to shuffle the loaves around on the stone next time to get the sides to brown more evenly 

The crumb is pretty good with nice glossy cell walls and the darn things keep disappearing along with the chèvre.

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Tom

sung to the tune of "it's getting better all the time".

as far as the "oven shuffle", after releasing the steam, I'll rotate the baguettes, or anything I bake, from left to right and also a 180 back to front making sure that all hot and cool spots in the oven are "shared" equally.  I'll also try to give them as much separation from each other as possible.

alan

Also I think I’ll try 3 instead of 4. They don’t “seem” crowded when I put them on the stone but the sides stay pretty pale.

Now that I think about it, when  I took a workshop a couple of years ago we had maybe 6 or 8” or even more between the baguettes on the loader. That was for a deck oven the size of a small bedroom....

Tom

It’s a real challenge to shape and score, when I only get to practice 3 or 4 baguettes a couple times a month. How long did it take you to master the nice even cylinders?

Tom