Baguette practice
Very slowly trying to make progress on baguettes.
Besides the excellent advice of alfanso, I have found Hamelman's video on baguette shaping helpful. Practicing these has made me a lot more aware of the benefits of a good preshape.
II. Made these with random grocery store flour to save the KA flour, which has been unavailable lately. This was a bad choice: the dough never developed properly and was sticky and hard to handle. The poor results are below. Problems include split seam (circled in red), dense interior, and poor scoring.
III. Another attempt with mostly KA flour didn't come out much better, although it was easier to handle. Ragged edges in the preshape led to the split seam towards the end visible below. The scoring was too horizontal for proper expansion, and the interior had large dense areas that seemed to correspond to where I had done the first fold when shaping. Used hot granite rocks in a cast iron pan to make steam for this batch. This worked much better than just a pan alone, but also led me to discover some new vents in my oven that rapidly let out much of the steam.
IV. These were around 50% whole wheat with sunflower seeds and came out a bit better than the previous two iterations. Shaping went much better this time around, evident from the fact that there are no split seams. I tried placing the loaves between two baking sheets, with the one on top inverted, rather than steaming the oven. This worked somewhat better and was also easier than steaming the oven. The baking sheets were set on top of some large cast iron pans as usual. Perhaps in part due to better steam, the scores opened better than on the previous batch. The crumb of both loaves exhibited a vein of densness along one edge (circled in red on one of the loaves in the image). I believe (?) this to be an artifact of shaping that will hopefully disappear with practice. The bottom of the loaf in the images below got too dark on the bottom because I didn't remove the loaves from the baking sheet halfway through.
Comments
I've given this to a few others and believe it helped them quite a bit, most recently the Roadside Pie King. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/63232/new-york-city-street-food
Folks love high hydration dough, but my take is that if you want to get better faster with a set of nascent baguette skills, drop the hydration down. Although the world. as well as myself, adores David's SJSD formula, I think that you should first get comfortable with the Hamelman Vermont SD formula as baguettes. A 90% AP flour with 10% rye and comes in at 65% hydration dough. Which you may think is too low, but it is a "perfect" hydration for training wheels, and I come back to it with regularity all the time.
Reworked for 1250g mix with a 100% hydration all AP flour. In just the two feeds, as outlined below, and beginning with David's levain starter, you'll have converted it to something that will come very close to an all AP levain.
Your scoring is still too lateral and has to evolve to be more longitudinal.
See if these help.
Also - watch a few minutes of this video by Martin Philip, another "world renowned" baker who worked alongside Jeffrey Hamelman for a long time. He has a simpler method of shaping baguettes than Mr. Hamelman, and one which more closely aligns with my own way of shaping (as if that last point means all that much!). https://youtu.be/j7Vlo1Me4gs?t=173
Thanks for all the advice! I will give the Vermont a try---training wheels sound very good to me.
Alfanso good morning,
Friendly comment, there might be a bug in your totals above for the Total Dough Weight, both in % and grams. The Starter is not adding to the total. All other figures in the template seem to be ok.
Other than this, let me thank you for being a bottomless source of information and inspiration to us all.
Please enjoy your day.
There is a lot to be absorbed here, at least in number of overall words, since I get paid by the word ;-) . And remember, you asked for it!
What can't be displayed on a flat spreadsheet are the simple, in my case, calculations behind it. I'm also unable to bring any colored bars across to the TFL text box when it was copied in from my spreadsheet, the starter row is highlighted in green to indicate (to me) that it is unique.
There are three columns of interest to this non-bug bug and the reasoning behind the three. And they all tie back to the Starter row. And specifically, number-wise, to the 1250g Vermont SD above...
So now for the drum roll please...why? Rather than recreate the wheel, I'll point you to two comments which should explain it further. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/54603/hamelman-baker’s-percentages#comment-394806.
And more importantly, see the comment two below that, which is my further "real world" explanation to Dan. Also look at the link in that second comment: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/54577/levain-or-starter-help-me-understand-terms#comment-394593 .
If you don't have access to Mr. Hamelman's Bread book, what I reference on pg. 151 reads: "The weight of the mature culture used in the levain build is not included in the final dough total or in the overall formula total yield, since it is presupposed that the baker will remove that portion prior to the final mix". And so when I created my initial spreadsheet from the BBGA "approved" formula, I abided by that statement, and added that Starter row to reflect all that is mentioned above.
And thanks for that "bottomless source of information" note. I'm looking forward to the day where I can go back to my favorite pub and enjoy a "bottomless source of ales"!.
alan
I got more oven spring on the Vermont, with much better opening of the scores (foolishly didn't document).
When shaping, I found that this formula offered significantly more resistance to being rolled out into a log than wetter doughs did----presumably this means that I should just give it a longer rest after preshape?
I'll definitely try these again in any case. Thanks for all your advice!