May 14, 2014 - 12:18am
Ciril Hitz's Baguettes
So I decided to try my hand at the baguette recipe from Ciril Hitz's book "Baking Artisan Bread". It starts off with an overnight poolish (1:1 ratio) which fermented very nicely and had a slightly sour smell near the end there. Then the poolish is added to a 2:1 flour to water ratio and 3/4 tsp of yeast and 12 grams of salt. The recipe yields 4 baguettes. Here's what came out:
My shaping and scoring obviously need practice but I think that's not bad for a first attempt.
Here's a look at the interior:
(I'm also very bad at photography but that's another issue =D )
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Hi, Aly
Nice straight baguette with good open crumb and color. What type of oven do bake in? is it gas oven or electric? What type of steaming technique do you use? I ask, because this has considerable impact on increased crust color to reddish/ golden hue.
Best of wishes,
Khalid
Thanks for the feedback Khalid. I use a gas oven and I kept it on maximum the whole time (it maxed out at 250 C). As for steam, I have an old pie pan that I heated at the bottom of the oven and when I loaded the bread in, I threw a big bunch of ice cubes in the pan and shut the door immediately.
This would produce a good burst of steam, but does it stay there? Also, Ice cubes will reduce the temperature of the oven, so it would be counter productive. Which brings me to the this question: do you bake on stone or on a metal sheet.
I had a gas oven before, and i know first hand how difficult it is to trap steam in such ovens; they are built to vent moisture, and they do. Some TFL members with gas ovens have posted phenomenal success using Sylvia's wet towel technique (read about it here).
Khalid
Thanks Khalid for the tip. It looks like a very interesting and simple method to have continuous steam in the oven. Luckily, my wife got fed up of me using the good towels in different baking tasks so she got a new set just for baking. I now have something for them to do =).
Nice loaves! The crumb looks good.
May I ask what flour you used?
How would you describe the crust?
I have had some problems with hitz's lean breads recepies resulting in a thick, slightly chewy crust, instead of thin and crisp.
Shai
I use the bread flour produced by a local mill. They market it as 'pizza flour' but I've compared its protein content with the all purpose flour and this one had more.
The crust wasn't actually as crisp as I would have hoped for but the flavor was very good so I'm not really complaining.
was also Ciril Hitz's recipe: the same one you used. That was a while ago; now it is still the formula I rely on.
Your baguettes look excellent, especially the crumb. Your also very right: shaping and scoring takes practice. I still don't have it to my satisfaction.
I second Khalid's recommendation re steaming, try to insure you have a moist atmosphere in the oven for the first ten minutes.
Well done!
David G
David,
Its a very good book. There's a lot of explanation in the book before any of the recipes show up. What was also very helpful is watching his videos on youtube where he demonstrates the shaping techniques explained in the book. Look for them under the user 'breadhitz'.