June 14, 2018 - 10:05pm
Replicating Alfanso's baguettes
I love using my sourdough starter and am attempting to replicate Alfanso's recipe and awesome results, whilst at the same time attempting to improve my baguette shaping skills (definitely a newbie here). Photos below. The dough was incredibly hard to work with and never held its shape, even though I had great elasticity after the 2-300 French folds.
My guess is the hydration was too high. I thought it was around 75%, but perhaps not...Going to drop it by about 20g water for the next round.
If anyone thinks hydration was not the problem, please let me know!
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Look at that crumb! You should be very, very pleased. As for the appearance of Alfanso's baguettes, I'm sure that will come. Color is fantastic too. Are you happy with the taste?
Enjoy them!
look lovely! That crumb is wonderful.
Well done!
Ru
Boy, that shot of the crumb is absolutely tantalizing! Looking at it makes me think about how good it would taste. No way that is not some good eating...
Dan
A thought, Adrian. You mention dropping the hydration by 20 grams, an arbitrary number. Let’s say you want to reduce the hydration by 5%. You could divide the total flour weight by 100 and multiply that by 5. Example - your total flour weight is 452 grams. 452 / 100 = 4.52 Then 4.52 x 5 = 22.6 or 23 grams. Keep in mind this is an example. I have no idea what the total weight of your flour might be.
I would think reducing the hydration to 70% would be a good place to start. As you succeed with the bake and gain confidence, you could slowly introduce more water.
I have tried a few times to make baguettes but have not managed a crumb like that!
Well done, keep practicing and drop the hydration a touch and see how it goes.Leslie
For the scoring make sure the bread is perpendicular to your body. Divide the top of the dough into thirds. keep all the scoring in the middle third only so that the scoring overlaps 30% but goes more longitudinally down the loaf rather than transverse across it. Get that blade cranked over till it is 30% off the top of the loaf's horizontal plane. You will get better shaping a perfect long, thin baguette the more you do it. Well done and
Happy baguette making the Don Baggs way.
And with practice it will all fall into place. So don't give up the ship! It looks as though your pre-shaping should be more standardized and tighter, either as mini-boules or little barrels. One thing that I've found is that little mishaps early on often yield larger problems the further down the road we go. So, if you get a good pre-shape, your final shape will be improved and so on.
But I also think that your hydration is too high. For beginning baguettes, I believe that most folks will do well to stay within the upper 60's range of hydration. An absolutely outstanding first levain baguette can be made with Mr. Hamelman's Vermont SD.
Keep at it. My earliest baguettes didn't look an awful lot different than yours do here, and yours may even look a might better.
I agree - I think each result cascades, or multiplies down the road. This is the second time the dough did not hold its shape, so just for good measure, I did 400 French folds to get an initial nice silky result, hoping this might have been the problem, but alas they still did not hold their shape - which is why I thought I had too much hydration.
Thanks for your suggestions.
It sure did taste fantastic, no question about that! I like a hard crust and open crumb, and I must admit I got that this time. Whilst making it I was thinking of Jason's quick ciabatta recipe where he talks about feeling like all is ruined, but happily, these things had some great oven spring.
I am sure I stupidly wrote the incorrect ingredient quantities -
480 white
80 poolish
400 water
But this would make for almost 85% hydration. I think it was closer to 80% with perhaps 380 water. Going to 360 water next time and evaluate.
Thanks again for all the constructive comments!