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Been clearing up old files on my PC and found photos of breads I baked ages ago and had comletely forgotten about….. One of them was Tartine’s Basic Country Bread.

I baked this recipe for the third time tonight, and I am still scratching my head.   For this iteration I made the following adjustments:

1)  Reduced the malt to 10 grams, based on Eric Hanner's parallel bake comments and results here.
2)  Reduced my mixing time to 10 minutes to reduce the level of dough development.
3)  Added a wire rack to the middle of my oven to avoid baking directly on my quarry tiles.

Here is the fourth (!) installment of my breadmaking tutorials. As always, your input is appreciated! Please see Ovenmitts Blog at www.ovenmittsblog.wordpress.com for the whole post!

Breadmaking 104 - Bakers' Percentages

So many people ask, “What’s up with these bakers’ percentages?? How does one loaf of bread make 175%?!”

“Rossisky” using the Three Stage Auerman Process; Pain au Levain using Rye Sour and Wheat Leavens; Panned “Wholewheat-style” Loaves with mixed leavens.

When I saw the strong proofing OWS was getting from his attempts at baking the Vienna Bread from Inside the Jewish Bakery.  I baked this as a tester a long time ago but this is the now released version so I thought I’d give it a whirl. It's a fast rising enriched dough that just takes a few hours to complete.

This was inspired by Franko's 25% Sour Rye with Toasted Seeds. I followed his recipe with the following alterations:

I desperately need help with crust. what I want is a paper thin, shatteringly crisp crust. but all I can achieve is moderately crisp but thick, hard, turtle shell crust. I have tried everything imagineable. dutch oven, cloche, steaming, misting absolutely everything I can think of.  KA AP, Gold Medal AP, bread flour ..got desperate and  yesterday I even used 1/2 C rice flour .. got the shattering part, but under it was 1/4 inch of turtle shell. (great rise and crumb) Fortunately my sandwich loaves are most always good. specially James Beard's sour cream bread.