Side Benefits of the Baguette Quest
If I lived my life in proper chronological order I would have preceded this post with actual crust and crumb reports, but... well, I don't seem to be on top of the linear existence thing at the moment, I guess. Anyway, during the past couple of weeks my baking obsession has been mostly focused on improving my baguettes; and though I necessarily work in very small batches and can't bake daily, I did finally reach the point where production outpaced even my appetite for fresh baguettes. And of course... they don't keep. So tonight there will be savory bread pudding for dinner, with thick-cut bacon and cheddar cheese and some kind of interesting veg or other. But meanwhile - ah, meanwhile there was today's lunch. Panzanella, with fresh local yellow tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, vinaigrette (I make my own red wine vinegar, but in this case I used a friend's chive-blossom-infused white vinegar, which was almost too delicate but not quite), and of course lots of hunks of my slightly over-the-hill baguettes and epis.
Oh, so good, so good. Panzanella, where have you been all my life?
(Baguettes: I think all of these were based on txfarmer's 36-hour, though one of them may have been from my earlier Bouabsa-inspired period. Must check my notes and maybe do a blog post about the progression and the progress. And then maybe I'll finally get around to formally introducing myself... Or not. No guarantees.)
if made with sourdough instead of commercial yeast. They taste better too!. I don'tt make non SD bread anymore for these 2 reasons. But could care less if anyone else does though. Some folks just don't like sour bread and pefer commercial yeast ones instead, Bread salad is a great way to use up crusty day old baguettes.
... but they'd been sitting out on the counter for quite a while. I mean QUITE a while. If it had been earlier in the season they'd have gotten moldy - as it is they simply had ample opportunity to go dry and stale, and meanwhile I kept baking more. In the course of this run of baguettes I've made some with raisin yeast water and some (these) with levain built on a seed from my rye sour; the only ones that had any commercial yeast in them at all were the Bouabsa ones, and for those I was using all of 2g fresh yeast per 500g flour - barely enough to register on the scale. For the record, the only ones that actually tasted sour at all were the RYW ones, and even that was a pretty mild tang. I do like sour breads, up to a point, though I mostly like the sourness pretty subtle. I like commercial yeast for some of the straight-dough breads that I know are going to live in the freezer (hamburger buns, that sort of thing), but I lean pretty heavily toward SD for most other things - and the occasional hybrid. My mainstay Jewish rye still includes some commercial yeast in the final dough, but it gets most of its oomph and character from the three-stage sour build (based on Greenstein), and I'm looking forward to phasing out the extra yeast altogether over the next couple of bakes. The rye sour is so exuberant and rambunctious, I can't imagine the bread actually needs that extra push; I assume it's just a matter of convenient timing. Which is pretty funny, considering that the sour builds take almost 24 hours - what's an extra couple of hours of proof time after that, right?
is dupposed to be at least a little bit sour and RYW haas no sour component at all, your sour yeast water bread and no sour sourdough bread is a bit of a quandry.