Tried a couple of new techniques today

I have been baking mostly the same bread since I started making bread with yeast this month. 

300 g AP flour

1 tsp yeast

1 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

1 cup water

I tried a couple of new things today - and what is really cool is that they all worked!

1.  autolyse for 30 min.

2. did a french fold. 

3. used a brotform

I switched to instant yeast with today's loaf so it would be easier to try autolyse.  I had been using ADY.  I guess it worked the way it was supposed to.  I had a cohesive dough after 30 minutes.

I found a great video on this site for doing the french fold:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dUZ0O-Wv0Q  I have a KA stand mixer, but its just a baby Classic Plus 4.5 and I did not want to fry it kneading dough every few days.  I set up my tablet with this video playing and did a french fold.  It worked spooky well!  Lift stretch fold - repeat a lot and ended up with a very nice ball of dough.  I did have to keep my hands wet to get the dough to stretch well - I do not know if I should or not, but it worked.

I just started baking bread this month, so that means I have been able to go and buy some fun, new toys.  I bought two small, oval brotforms and used one today.  Everything worked mostly great.  The formed, proofed dough came out of the brotform with no trouble, but since I am still learning how to form batards, I did not have my seam sealed very well and it blew out during baking.  I do not like a lot of flour on my baking loaves, so I tried to brush most of it off but there was flour on the parchment paper and I could smell it while the loaf baked, I did not like that at all.  I will have to get rid of the flour off the parchment next time.

Here is the loaf out of the brotform and getting ready to be baked

This is fresh from the oven - you can see where the side blew out

and this is what it looks like inside

So, not a bad day of baking.