Currently I am on a baguette kick. My wife bought a food processor for me this Christmas.  I often cook for a crowd and this machine is great.  It's the big WS Cuisinart model and it stays on the counter and I'm trying to use it for everything I possibly can.  I happened across the Van Over recipe in an old Cuisinart manual.  I looked at the recipe and thought the hydration seemed kind of low at 63% but made it anyway.  It was the easiest dough to handle - very tasty, but needed more crackle and more holes.   I added an ounce of water bringing the hydration to about 69%.  I then saw van Over's published recipe online  and noticed that he had made the same change.   I guess I learned from you all…  The bread was good but could be better.  

I just finished a batch of baguettes with this formula adjusted to 72% hydration and have a batch of dough in the fridge at 75%.  

I'm attempting to adapt other baguette techniques to the food processor . My goal is to get a food processor dough with higher hydration and minimal active time and minimal kitchen mess.  And of course improve technique along the way.

Here is the 75% hydration Van Over recipe result:

Scoring and shaping are getting better I think...

I then tried the Baguettes a la Bouabsa as described on Breadcetera by SteveB.  Did the autolyse first.  For the 200 slap and folds I processed for 45 seconds.  I left the dough in the processor and turned the machine on every 20 minutes until the ball reformed and spun for 5 seconds where the original recipe called for more folding.  

All went ok.  These were very tasty.  Minimal yeast aroma.  Crust was snappy.  Crumb not as open as I'd have liked.  Dough overworked?  Maybe too much pressure during shaping?  Under proofed?  Not sure...

One of them became these Baguette Crisps.  Perfect for Hummus!!!

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The next batch was a blend of the Mark Bittman recipe from How to Cook Everything, and the Charles Van Over food processor recipes.

KABF             500g

wheat germ   10g

SAF yeast 1/2 tsp

Salt 1 1/2 tsp

Warm Water 364g

Mixed in food processor with metal dough blade for 30 sec.   Dough temp was 95F after the mix and was sticky to the touch.

4 hours Bulk fermentation then divide and preshape to small torpedoes.

Rest 15min then shape 

Proof en couche (parchment paper) 90 min

Bake at  480F for 22 min with steam for the first 10 min

These are my best yet.  All done in one night.  Very tasty and light.  Loaves went from 210g before baking to 170 after...

Next 2 batches are both in the fridge:

-The same as above (Bittman Van-Over) except with 24 hour plus cold retardation after the bulk for baking first thing in the morning.

-DonD's Baguettes a l'Ancienne except I am using  the food processor for the mixing...  Tomorrow this gets yeast, the rest of the water, stretching / folding etc...

Any comments or tips?

tordoc

I recently purchased a porcelain 2 qt casserole dish with lid, $15 at a Target store, and have gotten very nice results with it making a Bittman/Lahey style loaf 1/3 larger than the original recipe (NY times, Nov 8, 2006) by a simplified procedure in which I never touch the unbaked dough, nor transfer it to and from a floured towel.  The breads come out of the casserole dish with a 2 inch wall, a crown 5 inches high, and a symmetrical dome. Loafs made according to the original Bittman/Lahey recipe, especially in larger pots, tend to be no more than 3 inches high, have little or no wall, and are frustratingly small.

I mix the dry ingredients, 4 cups flour, 1.5 tsp salt, slightly heaped 1/4 tsp Fleischman rapid rise yeast in a 3 qt pyrex bowl, add 1.5 cups of warm water, then with a fork mix and form a relatively stiff dough ball, then add 1/4 cup water to loosen the dough ball somewhat for rising. Instead of transferring the dough to a flowered towel a la Bittman, I keep the dough in the pyrex bowl for the 18 hr rising, 15 min rest and 2 hr second rising, reshaping the dough ball after each period, then drop the dough ball into the casserole dish preheated at 450 degrees F., bake for 30 min with lid on, then 15 min with lid off.  The bread smells, looks and tastes great, with a crunchy flavorful crust that shatters when bitten,  and a spongy, bounce-back texture inside the loaf. Thanks to the single transfer from pyrex bowl to casserole dish, no scattered flour or flour-loaded towel to clean up    

Continuing my experiments with Lahey bread...

I cut up fresh cherry tomatoes and a medium sized "regular" tomato, and threw in 2 tsps ground oregano. Then I hand-mixed them into my gorgeous, gorgeous Lahey dough which had fermented for 26 hours. It was a struggle, and when it ended, I thought I had thoroughly destroyed all the gas and air in the dough. I also thought that the dough had finished all the fermenting it was going to ferment, as it looked somewhat shiny, like a kind of cheap plastic. So with heavy heart (not really, it was fun!) I let it sit in my fermenting tub for another hour and fifteen minutes, not really expecting to see any change. To my surprise, back came at least a modicum of bubbles, and, taking no chances, I poured it onto a wheat-branned towel and did a sloppy. mimimal fold job as best as I could, and turned on my convection oven to 500-degrees. Twenty-minutes later, I was dismayed to see the dough was plaster-stuck to the towel (like an idiot I should have first turned the dough onto my counter and floured it before towel-wrapping it). Getting the dough into the pot was---ahem--an adventure, (and I had to throw the towel into the garbage). There really wasn't enough dough to fill my cast-iron pot properly, and what I managed to place into it looked like it had been torn apart by four fighting pitbulls pulling from all the points of the compass.

Naturally my expectations were low. Who ever heard of waiting for 26 hours to load veggies into a dough, to say nothing of eschewing the time-honoured tradition of inserting them by flattening the dough, distributing the pieces all over it, then rolling it up like a carpet? And to abuse the dough thoroughly (Lahey & Reinhart, excuse me), and pot it in such a sorry, flaccid state?

Well, this bread hardly came out singing Hallelujah --- a lot of the tomatoes gravitated too close to the crust, and the crumb was a wee bit over-moist and closed in places --- but it DID have a truly memorable crust, and the taste was first-class.

Question to anyone who reads this: any suggestiuons for next time, given the same ingredients? Comments would be appreciated greatly, since I am a complete novice. See another picture below.

So I've made no-knead bread before and was a bit disappointed. But recently I got reinspired to try the Bittman/Lahey version as published in the NYT:

3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, more for dusting
1 5/8 cups water
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1 1/4 teaspoons salt

Mark Bittman was on "Good Food" on KCRW with Evan Kleiman a couple of weeks ago, talking about this recipe. What's interesting was that in his interview notes, he mentions the weights to use. However, someone please tell me how 1-5/8 cups water weighs 345g! :)

I measured these ingredients, and here's the comparison:

Flour: 428g (me), 430g (Bittman) (3 cups)
Water: 385g (me), 345g (Bitt.) (1-5/8 cups)
Table Salt: 8g (me), 8g (Bitt.) (1-1/4 tsp)
Instant Yeast: 1g (me), 1g (Bitt.) (1/4 tsp)

What's interesting about this, is that the water listed is close to 89% hydration! As a result, the dough is extremely wet and goopy, almost like a batter! Here are baker's percentages (using a nice dough calculator); I'm using ADY instead of IDY:

Flour (100%):     430.37 g  |  15.18 oz | 0.95 lbs
Water (89%):     383.03 g  |  13.51 oz | 0.84 lbs
ADY (.2%):     0.86 g | 0.03 oz | 0 lbs | 0.23 tsp | 0.08 tbsp
Salt (1.8%):     7.75 g | 0.27 oz | 0.02 lbs | 1.39 tsp | 0.46 tbsp
Total (191%):    822 g | 28.99 oz | 1.81 lbs | TF = N/A

My questions are:

1. 89% hydration can't be right, can it? Did I do something wrong here?
2. How much water do you use when you make this recipe?

Mark Bittman of the "famous" Sullivan bakery no knead bread had recipe last week in the NYT for fried pizza. Husband and I tried it last night and it's pretty darn good!