Sorry, these endless, near identical baguette posts are probably becoming terribly dull, but I get such great feedback and advice from you guys.
So, as I want to get more practice with baguettes, I decided to start doing some less time-intensive recipes than txfarmer's 36hr and dmsnyder's SJSD recipes (both of which are amazing). I recently found txfarmer's straight dough practice baguette recipe and gave it a try in order to work on shaping, scoring, and especially to try out Sylvia's Mega Steam method as recommended to me by alfanso, dmsnyser, and dabrownman.
I think this was probably my best shaping and scoring effort so far, but by far the best things to come out of this were:
- seeing how great Mega Steam is, and
- proving David's comment that too much steam (i.e. steam for too long) can work against ear formation by allowing the crust to collapse on itself.
We don't have a microwave so I rolled up six bar towels and tied them into bundles, soaked them in boiling water and used a lobster steaming pot to preheat. I considered using a pressure cooker to superheat them as a microwave would, but you have to draw the line somewhere :) I had a large cast iron pan on the floor of the oven and a heavy duty baking sheet above the baking stone during preheating.
I put four towels on the sheet and two in the CI pan, loaded the baking stone, poured boiling water on both and closed the door. Huge plumes of steam ensued!
I was keeping an eye on the bake through the door for the first several minutes, and watched as the loaves bloomed like crazy, and produced fantastic ears. Success! Then I made the oft-repeated mistake of starting to watch the clock instead of using my head. Steamed for 12 minutes total (added water to the skillet about 8 minutes in) and then removed the pan and skillet. By the time the bake was finished The ears had been completely subsumed back into the loaves, and the loaves overall had flattened visibly.
I'm looking forward to next time and will remove the steam when everything looks to be at its peak in terms of rise and ears. I also wonder if I overdid it the steam and it lowered the oven temp. I didn't get the darkness of crust I would have expected for the amount of time time the loaves were in.
Verdict on the bread: the recipe produces good loaves for the low effort. Certainly nothing like the complexity of taste present in either of the two recipes mentioned above, but easily as good as, or better than, the baguettes available in local (non-"artisan") bakeries. Nice thin, crisp crust, and good open crumb.
Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post, but all-in-all a very valuable learning experience, one I'll be repeating, and hopefully next time will be better. Thanks for all the help!
Cheers,
-Gabe