Happy weekend! I made baguettes for the first time in a long time today. BBA's poolish baguettes. One mistake...the recipe, er formula, calls for 7 oz. of poolish. I made half a recipe of poolish from the book, which is really more like 11 oz., and dumped it all into the final dough. ooooops. But what are you gonna do with 4 oz. of leftover poolish?

This dough gets 4 hours of fermentation and about an hour of proofing. The baguettes came out sorta pretty, I thought:

Yesterday I made the Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Swirl Bread from Peter Reinharts The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I have to say, that was the best bread I have ever tasted. It was so packed with raisins and nuts! I'm definitily going to make this again. Both loaves were gone before the end of the night and my family still wanted more. I feel bad for my sister who only got 2 slices....I think I had 5!

Me, dividing the dough: 

Hello all,

Could anyone, please, please, post the BBA pain a l'ancienne recipe.... I want to start it tonight and (I don't have the book) I won't be able to drop-by the library to pick it up :(

Thanks sooooo much

Srishti

So I got the BBA from the library last week (great read!) and have made 3 loaves with the pate fermentee (2 pain de campagne, 1 French bread).  The taste is delicious, the crust is very nice, but I don't have very big holes.  The Acme Baguettes from Glazer's Artisan Baking Across America, however, has given me big holes every time.  Any suggestions where I might get bigger holes from the BBA?

Thanks.

There has been some discussion about problems with the BBA ciabatta recipe and not being able to achieve an open crumb.  I have tried this recipe 3 times with varying results based on changes I made but was still not able to get the crumb correct.  I'm a very new bread baker but this was the first recipe I made about two months ago.  Each time it had a very good flavor and I think its worthy of trying to find out if it is a flawed recipe or if those of us who've tried it are making some error. 

I don't know why, but I thought making bagels was considerably more complicated than making a loaf of bread. Well, it's not: it is easy.

A recipe and a description of how easy it was to make these below.