alfanso's blog

In my most recent entry, dabrownman urged/challenged me to make David Snyder's Pugliese Capriccioso boule as baguettes.  So what is a boy to do?  Hmm.

At 74.5% hydration to go along with a 75% AP : 25%Durum flour mix and 20% levain, it seemed like a fine idea.  I had to sneak this one in somewhat quickly as:

• My brother and his wife will be here and I planned on having a batch of David's sesame semolina levain still warm on their arrival Thursday evening
• I seem to have little control over my desire/need to bake another batch of baguettes.  I'm just starting therapy on this one now...

Violating David's instructions somewhat, I used my standard 75% hydration levain and added a few more grams of water to the mix to bring the hydration back up, finished up the bulk ferment cycle with a cold retard, divided, shaped and couched the dough overnight, and finally baked right out of the refrigerator this morning.  Timings were 13 minutes under steam, 14 minutes more and then 2 minutes of venting - 29 minutes total at 460dF.

The sesame baguette was my version of being "capriccioso" or whimsical.  I didn't particularly like my pre-shape of that baguette, so I figured that I'd bury the evidence under a layer of sesame seeds.

The dough was initially quite smooth at the outset of my French Folds, but quickly seemed to get a bit sticky and stay that way through the first set of Letter Folds before loosing the tackiness for good.  All the while the dough remained quite extensible.

Now that I've tasted it, I concur with David's assessment - nutty and sweet.

Once more, I implore you folks.  For those of you who are Dutch Oven bound, and for good reason considering the excellent results that get posted on TFL with regularity:  Try getting out of the pot, so to speak, and do some couched batard and baguette shaping and scoring to expand the repertoire and experience.  It may be a bit frustrating at first (I should know!), but you might just enjoy the freedom and change of pace.

Crumb shot added

alan

Yeah, I know.  I've posted my version of these SJSD's before.  But I have a new oven (again).  I recently posted my first two bakes with the new oven, the Tartine Country Bread done up as baguettes.  I was a bit perplexed as to how long the baguettes took to bake: 32 minutes at 300g each.  Way too long in my book.  And I wondered whether it was the oven, or me or the dough, or or or...  So I needed to return to a reliable workhorse for a comparison bake.  And to also see how the new oven performed in relation to not just the Tartines but also to the prior oven.

And they did just fine.  13 minutes of steam followed by 10 minutes more, and an additional 4 minutes for the batard.  A bit too browned on the grigne, but they opened up beautifully, so who am I to complain?  They bake a bit too close together in my 30" wide oven and so the sidewalls get a bit too much insulation from one another, hence a slightly lighter shade on the sides.  

Similar to the Tartines - 3x300g baguettes and 1x550g batard.  I guess the Tartines are just a different animal, and maybe/maybe not designed to work well in the baguette format.  Perhaps one day I'll conform to a more rigid standard and try to bake Mr. Robertson's Tartine baguette formula itself.

My hat's off to David Snyder for not just this formula, but for being an inspiration to a number of other bakes that are chugging along just dandy for me.  Could I have done it had there been no dmsnyder?  For the most part, I guess so, but I can't go back now.  Mr. Peabody and Sherman took the Wayback Machine with them.

alan

About a year and a half ago, The New York Times featured the formula for the Tartine Country Bread in their food section.  I dutifully copied it off and even more dutifully dropped it in the back of my pack of formulae for "sometime in the future".  Finally deciding to make the loaf as baguettes, I didn't stop to consider that there is a Tartine baguette formula also and that it is quite different than for the Country Bread, and with a much lower hydration.  

But that would ruin my narrative and my string of converting boules and batards to baguettes and vice versa.  So off I went to see some notes on TFL about it.  And I discovered that txfarmer knocked it off way back in 2010, years before I was around these parts.  And to quote her, verbatim, "Who's up for shaping this dough into baguettes?".  Well, I am!

With a new oven to learn to deal with (that's another tome for another day), I made it last week and had some slight difficulties.  Nothing earth-shattering but it could have been better.  Was the problem the formula as a baguette, me, the new oven, or any random combination.  Who knows just yet.  The bread didn't get the standard bloom and oven spring that I've come to expect, but it also is far from entering into the Frankenstein range of bakes.    

Rescaled from the original weight down to ~1500g for each bake, on my second attempt I dropped the overall hydration down from 77% to 75% to make the dough a bit more manageable, and it probably worked in my favor, although I'm not quite sure about that.  Living on a couche overnight in the refrigerator, the dough shed a lot of moisture.  Even with the amount of flour that I used to dust the couche (still quite nominal), the dough was a bit resistant to cleanly flipping from couche to hand peel, but not much of an issue.  Just not a completely clean transition.

I'm also surprised at how long these baguettes baked for, 13 minutes with steam and then another 19 after that.  That's a pretty long bake at 450dF for baguettes.  The one batard (how could I resist?) took an additional 6 minutes.

3x300g baguettes, 1x550g batard, created using my standard methodology of 300 French Folds, bulk retard for x hours and then divide, shape, couche and retard until bake time.  The lead picture is from the first bake.

Pre shaped and waiting to become something...

alan

Jeffrey Hamelman's pain au levain with mixed sourdough starters.  I've made this before as both baguettes and batards.  So this is nothing new now, although it has still only been a small handful of bakes so far.  I like the concept of the two starters, one stiff and one quite liquid.  As much for an interesting change of pace as well as the process.

What is important to me is consistency.  I want to need to feel as though I can create and then recreate, pretty faithfully, the same breads time after time.  At this point, after a little over two years of home baking, I probably have about 20 different breads or more in my rotation, some revisited way more frequently than others.  But it is the ability to come back to, to return to a prior bread, and then be able to do it again.  To make it look as though it could have been part of that prior bake.  That is an accomplishment that I can feel good about.  And it's happening with regularity now.

There's a ton about baking, even some of the basics, that is still beyond my grasp at this stage, but that's okay.  I seem to have found my niche, my wavelength where I can operate well.  I'll learn more over time, but as I'm not obsessive about any of this, that "over time" will have a long duration.  And I'm quite comfortable with that.  I'm not that young impetuous kid anymore.  He lives in the past.  Baking and learning slow as I go is my present, and hopefully my future too.

Just of the heck of it, here are a pair of pictures from the prior bake in October...

Update: 12/16

That consistency continues to permeate from one bake to the next, further evidence that repetitive results can be achieved.  

Here is a batch of Hamelman's Pain au Levain with WW (with a single stiff bread flour starter here), also something that I've made as both baguettes and batards and posted previously.  These completed bulk fermenting on the bench at 11 PM Monday night and then retarded as bulk.  Tuesday early AM they were divided, shaped, couched and then returned to the refrigerator.  I got around to baking these on Tuesday evening at ~9 PM.  As usual, directly from retard into oven.  Therefore these had a 22 hour retard in total, well beyond what I think is the recommended retard time frame.

I wonder at what point the acids in the levain start to break down the gluten structure.  These may have shown the first effects of that, but I'm not good enough or knowledgeable enough to know that yet.

Just for a change of pace I thought that I'd try a riff on the Raisin-Pecan WW Levain that I've been baking, which are based on Ken's Artisan Bakery's gems.  A voyage not too far offshore to visit an Apple-Walnut WW Levain version.

Pretty much a straight exchange of fruit and nut for other fruit and nut.  Taking a suggestion that I'm sure I've seen on TFL, I started out with dried apple rings, and soaked them in apple cider for a day.  The idea being to attempt to introduce a stronger apple flavor than what I might otherwise get from just using fresh apple.

These seemed to have a particularly robust oven spring, although the shaping and scoring adhered to my standard method.  The left of the two batards had a double score down its spine, but the oven spring would have none of that, and burst the division between scores right open.  The grigne on the right batard, in the last picture, is so wide that it completely burst apart where the end of the score usually has the two sides of the bloom meet.  Okay, I'll accept its apology!

Gave away the baguette to an (un)suspecting compatriot with the caveat that neither man nor beast had yet ever tasted these, and reminded him to ensure that his health care policy for the family was paid up ;-) .  I'll get a report back tomorrow.  If he still looks healthy and with no sallow complexion, I'll try the batard myself!

Okay, so my friend didn't come down with the whooping cough or the heebie jeebies or any other illness from the bread.  But I snuck in a few bites last night before it was determined that he was still ambulatory!  And then I had some toast this morning too.  

Anyway, I was surprised at the distinct lack of apple taste in the bread.  Much more lost in the flavor panel than the golden raisins, which the apple replaced.  The raisins gave a distinctively sharp burst of flavor completely unmatched by the apple.  As far as the walnuts, they have a dry mouth feel in general, and carried over to the bread as well.  I didn't glean much value to replacing the pecans with them either.  I may give this another go, but if/when I do, I think that I'll sub out some of the water in the hydration for apple cider.  If that doesn't give the batard a kick start, I'll chalk it up to just another adventure here on the Isle of TFL.

The crumb shot below.  Considering the amount of oven spring, the batard exhibits a surprisingly denser crumb than I would have anticipated.  Not a complaint, just an observation.

alan

The first two for our S.F. friends visiting with us earlier this week, and the third for our TG dinner with cousins nearby.  Happy Thanksgiving.  alan

A pair of Greenstein/Snyder Jewish Rye loaves 

A pair of Raisin-Pecan WW Levain Batards, plus one little baguette just because...

A pair of SJSD Batards 

Sure, as it has been months since I tried these out once before.  Sold at Ken's as demi-baguettes.  As long as I'm on my thang about changing baguettes to batards, and vice versa, why not?  Those black things on top are/were golden raisins, not black jelly beans...

Reversing direction from my recent thang to make baguettes from boule/batard formulae.  I searched TFL and found minor but inconclusive evidence that anyone had published their results for creating batards from the Bouabsa baguette format.  So it was high time that some silly goose decided to do it.  I waddled into the tide with both webbed feet.

As I'd mentioned earlier when I made a batch of Bouabsa baguettes for the first time in a long time, this is the baguette that "put me on the board", so to speak.  The simplest of them all, by the clock the quickest way to bulk fermentation fame and fortune, and the longest retard period.  Since I got on the levain bandwagon quite a ways back now, I hardly ever bake anything that is purely a commercial yeast product.  Neither political statement nor religious conviction nor an us vs. them confrontation.  It just happens that basically everything else I decide on baking contains either no or scant amounts of IDY.   Fine by me either way.

A roll in the sesame seeds for 2 of the boys because I love the look as well as the taste of them.  These should have been handled with a bit more kid gloves than I did, and I think that perhaps the lovely open crumb structure on these suffered due to that.

I should have paid attention to my own heed from that recent bake.  With no out-of-the-retarder warm up and proof, as I bake directly from the refrigerator, I neglected to give the bulk dough an additional 30 minutes of bench rest after the 3rd letter fold.  And of course, my old war cry of "I should have let them take on a half shade more color", was forgotten.

Oh well, they are still nice.  Can't hit a home run every time.

I was a bit too aggressive on shaping the center and right batards, particularly the "nude" batard.  Notice the tear in the skin on the lower left portion of this one.  That means trouble ahead.  Indeed!

And as evidenced by the final product, the tear in the skin did in fact affect the bloom and shape of the center batard.  The bloom and shape of the left batard was also affected by aggressive shaping, although less so.  The right batard is just dandy.  

The two seeded bookends.

The crumb suffered from the aggressive shaping.  This is the innards of the nudie.  The other two had destinations beyond my own kitchen and gullet.

Still converting boule and batard formulae to baguettes.  This time it is Jefrey Hamelman's Pain au Levain with mixed SD starters.  I'd made this once before, when I first started doing batards and had just then recently created a rye starter.  And now its number came up to make some baguettes - and one batard (just for old time's sake).

A recent discussion by EKMEK  / David entitled Too Much Steam? drew me into the conversation.  David's concern was about his baguettes being too wet, and from there the discussion grew.  And so I dedicate this blog entry to that conversation.

I don't recall where I found the formula, so I have no point to refer back to, except for my own crib sheet.  It calls for the creation of a 125% bread flour liquid levain as also an 82% stiff rye levain.  Being the upstart that I am, instead of beginning from scratch with stiff starters the way he outlines them, I converted my mixed flour 75% starter to the 125% liquid levain and my 100% rye starter to the 82%, each in a single build.  The rye took the better part of 12 hours and the liquid took less than 3 hours.

Overall this is a low hydration dough for me, coming in at ~70%.  After a sticky initial mix, the dough tightened up considerably but never fought back.  Another in my "compendium" of 2 Hamelman formulae where the dough is a cinch to work with and almost wants to shape itself.

One difference to my standard shaping schedule is that the dough completed its bulk rise at midnight, and I didn't feel as though I wanted to wait unto 2 AM to start the divide, etc. process.  I usually retard for anywhere from 1-3 hours before the divide and shape phase.  Instead I waited until ~ 6 AM this morning, completed shaping and back into the refrigerator by 6:30 AM, all couched up and back to another 6-7 hour retard.  This provides further evidence, as I've stated before, that once retarded, the bulk dough can meet your schedule instead of the other way around.

Back to EKMEK: discussion centered around steaming, timing, and also whether baking on a too hot deck tile will burn or scorch the bottom.  So here are the particulars for you David:

• preheat to 480dF for 45 minutes
• at ~30 minutes put in a pan with Sylvia's Steaming Towel
• at ~45 minutes score the dough straight from the refrigerator, load them into the oven, and then 2 cups of water on 480dF lava rocks.
• turn oven down to 465dF, the desried baking temperature
• 12 minutes later, release the steam, rotate the dough in the oven.
• 15 minutes later, remove the three baguettes
• 6-8 minutes later remove the batard.

Every time that I open the oven door, I reset my oven back to 465dF to make sure that it re-fires again.  Opening that door will cause a lot of heat to immediately escape.  Can't have that!

3 x 300g baguettes and 1 x 600g batard.

And these are the results.  You can do this David, it just takes practice and more practice.

And to underscore my point that the preheated deck tile does not scorch the bread (at least in my oven):

And finally got around to slicing one open

alan

Next up was making baguettes based on Ken's Artisan Bakery's Country Brown batards and boules.  The other day I did the same to his bakery's Country Blonde.  Not much to add except that I'm in the midst of a tear for getting batard and boule formats squeezed into baguettes.  Must be an affliction, Doc.

These are significantly higher whole grain breads with lower hydration, with that combination resulting in a baguette that doesn't display quite as much oven spring as do other breads that I've been baking.  Still, a nice dough to work with and to shape.  And a pretty fair final result. 

The lead picture are the four "all dressed up" and a minute shy of hitting the oven deck.

It's a nasty job, but someone's gotta do it!

alan