bakingmaniac's blog

Hi folks!

I have 3 bread books: Hamelman, Forkish and a third... about 3 years ago, when I used to bake bland, dull, straight dough breads and had no idea TFL existed, my sister gave me this book (maybe she got tired of eating my dull bread while having to call it delicious!), which was a rather poorly translated Brazilian edition of a book called "Pains et viennoiseries de l'école Lenôtre".

Well, this book has a very different structure of recipes and very concise instructions I absolutely couldn't understand nor follow. So it took me a few more months till I finally found out about TFL, which helped me learn how to make real bread, and guided my decision to purchase my copy of Hamelman, which is still my favorite bread book. So after baking many many breads from Hamelman and Forkish I decided to try my luck with the Lenôtre book again.

Ah, the difference experience makes! The big difficulty about Lenôtre's book is that it begins straight out with telling you to make a several-kilo big ball of levain, which you then use, in varying proportions, for all the recipes. It tells you to build "la mère" (the mother), then "le chef", and finally "le levain", but tells nothing about what each stage does, and why the hydration changes between them, or why you need to make such a big ball.

Turns out the levain the recipes asks for is a simple stiff levain build at 64.51% hydration, which you can build the day before, or in the morning depending on your schedule, with your own regular, small culture (I maintain about 50 - 100g). So if a recipe calls for 600g of levain, you solve the equation system

f + w = 600

w = 0.6451 * f

, and there you have it, you simply build your levain with f grams of flour and w grams of water, and your recipe is now in the exact same format as we are all used to.

I like this weekend's bake not only because of the flavor, which was amazing, but also because it symbolized a maturity I acquired on so many fronts in bread baking. My culture is thriving, responsive, and has a delicious smell. I have finally baked recipes from TFL and all 3 of my books. I'm leaving behind pale dull breads for good, as the crust this time came out with a beautiful dark color. The sound the crust makes when the knife enters it is just beautiful. There's much to celebrate in this bake.

The following is adapted from the Lenôtre recipe "pain de campagne au levain". It is a 10% rye, 90% AP, 64% hydration (I also found it strange that the recipe's numbers result in such low hydration), with added golden flaxseeds. Bulk fermented for 2 hours with one fold, then shaped and proofed overnight in the fridge. Baked Forkish style, in a dutch oven, seam side up for natural springing of the seams.

Many thanks to the community,

Antonio

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.