February 11, 2007 - 10:47am
Finally got good holes
I bought Hammelman's book last week, and decided to try 3 recipes: pain rustique, country bread and whole wheat levain.
I read more on folding, and I think this helped me get much better holes in the crumb than before. At first, I thought the pain rustique had bigger holes than the country bread, but as I cut more into the country bread, the two were pretty comparable. Here are some of the results:
One slice of each:
Whole wheat levain:
Pain rustique:
And, finally, country bread:
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Those are Beautiful......
I wish I could get some of those holes too!!!
These are beautiful loaves. Can you give us more detail on how you achieved this?
Trish,
The biggest change I made was to fold instead of punch down the dough during bulk fermentation. I really just simply followed the directions in Hammelman's book, except for one thing - I heated the oven to 550 before putting in the bread, put boiling water on the top rack, and sprayed a couple of times at 30 second intervals, then lowered the temp to the ones listed in the recipes. I baked on full convection, and just baked to temperature, not to the time set in the recipe.
Curt McAdams