No Steps Forward, Two Steps Back :)

Fairly ambitious to double up, but there's lots to be proud of with them. I'm sure they taste(d) great. Baguettes seem to present the biggest challenge for many of us. I wonder for pro's, how many hundred they make before they are fully confident...

My first were shaped longer than would fit in my oven (yes, I knew, but...). I had to bend them to fit, so had "U" shaped baguettes! LOL Now, when I make them, they are 'demi's'.

Cathy

Gabe,

As you noted, if you are trying to change something, don’t change more than one parameter at a time.  Whether the result is more wrong or more right, you won’t be able to know for certain why the change occurred.

Here is a link to a really essential TFL comment displaying a visual guide of how underproofed, proofed and overproofed baguettes should look.  Provided by Maverick from Oct. 2014 it is attributed to Ciril Hitz.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/308447#comment-308447 .

One reason for the crumb being too dense is that without the bloom, the dough has nowhere to expand to, and therefore the crumb will stay tight.  Also if the dough is overproofed, the yeast just doesn’t have the oomph to make that desperate push as it goes into its final death spiral.

Others are sure to comment on the lack of overlap on your scoring.  Recall that you should have about a third overlap for each score. Your Nessie is due to that lack of overlap.  Ciril Hitz has a video on scoring and he demonstrates that pretty clearly.  However, your ability to balance a baguette atop a can of tomatoes is admirable – at the top of your game there!

The shaping looks very good.

Steaming tips – ensure that the oven is up to temp before inserting the pan with towels.  Then give them the better part of 15 minutes, per dabrownman, before loading the dough.  He uses more than one pan.  I use a combo of one Pyrex loaf pan with a rolled up towel and also a metal pan filled with lava rocks.  The loaf pan with water is heated in my microwave before placing into the oven so it already has a nice head start.  The lava rock pan lives in my  oven and gets doused with near boiling water, 2 cups worth, just after the dough is loaded.  I see your oven door has a glass window. A cautionary tale that I am fortunately not reporting first hand is to make sure that you cover the glass door with a towel prior to pouring water into a pan in the oven.  If your aim is bad or get a spill over, etc. onto the glass in the door – you may well be cleaning up shattered glass, crying the blues and paying for a new glass window on the oven.

Although steam is really hot, without pressure it won’t rise above 212dF.  It cools down the ambient oven temperature, although a baking deck will retain its heat.

Determine what your oven temperature recovery time is.  As soon as, and every time, you open the door to the oven, heat is lost.  My oven has a slow recovery time, so I figured out that I have to literally shut the oven off and then immediately reset the bake temp to force the oven into recovery mode – after every time that I open the door.

We don’t (at least the majority of us out here) work with professional baking ovens which can have incredibly thick and dense baking decks for heat retention.  I would be cautious about doing multiple loads one immediately after the other.  I’m not certain from your post if that’s what you did, but my guess is that as you were in “quasi-panic” mode, that you did.

Your refrigerator is a retarder, and aside from chilling foods it retards the activity of whatever is placed in it.  In this case, slowing down or placing into (near) sleep mode yeasted products.  It is your friend for time/temp management.

There’s apparently a good reason why the “common knowledge” is that baguettes are the “hardest” shaping and scoring to do well.  I’m certainly not putting down any other standard shaping such as boules or batards, and I have way way less experience with them than my chosen burden in bread life, but I’m certain that I see many less frustrating posts over shaping and scoring of those than over baguettes.

If you are happy with the flavor but miserable over the look of the baguettes, they will make for excellent bread crumbs or croutons.  If all else fails, Barney should help you “bury the dead”,  just don’t make a happy dog into a corpulent one.

And finally, coming from a Bronx boy, where there was always a distinct lack of respect for Kings County (better known as Brooklyn), and I’m certain the feeling was mutual, that you have settled there is apparently the core issue and the heart of all your baking woes.

alan

pizza stone all of them were too long and drooped over the edge - they came out looking like they had 3"  droopy noses at both ends.   These don't look too bad and they coukd be worse as you will see later this week ....since we are baking sprouted, scalded, 20% whole multi-grain baguettes on Friday.:-)

We went back to see how we baked them in 2012.  It seems we preheated to 550 F and put the cold Mega Steam in when the oven hit the preheat mark and then waited 15 minutes for the steam to really get going and for the stone to hit the oven temperature.  We baked them at 480 F   No double loads though.

Baguettes can be frustrating but they usually taste fine no matter how they look! It will be better next time....but that is what I said last time!

Happy baguette baking 

Found a picture of the droopy nose

...then you're in a really good spot. The crumb on your 36-hours is just awesome. 

When I have two separate bakes going (especially if they're high-hydration), I have found that a 15-25 minute rest in the freezer followed by a rest in the fridge (up until baking time) retards just about the right amount. And that burst of cold doesn't hurt the ovenspring!

Alan's comment was fascinating to me, but it kind of made me self-conscious too...I agree that boule-shaping is a confidence-booster, but I have yet to find a batard-shaping technique with which I'm truly confident. My batards are all over the place. 

And I didn't realize you're from England! Whereabouts? 

as long as you learned something from the experience, it is successful. 

With the practice baguettes -

I'm thinking about alfonso's comment on the scoring and your comment about the over proofing.  The steam level did allow your scores to bloom.  If the steam level was higher, it would have allowed the dough between your scores to stretch more, is that correct?  And if the scores were ideal (don't we all wish) maybe even at lower steam as you said you experienced, better scores would have mitigated the Nessie factor by allowing the scores and the dough between to expand easier, in balance to the tight and the scored? 

The crust - it appears thin, is it actually, for crispy/crunchy high bubble crackly goodness or is it right and just appears thin in photos? 

I trumped your Mistake #3 even more so, creativity or necessity often beats that logical determination to change one thing at a time into such a submissive state we only remember it in hindsight.  I'm fighting too crusted, so I'm curious on your opinion in your end result here on the crust. 

I hope you don't mind that I am analyzing your experience and changes with the practice baguettes while I do the same with mine.  Asking questions, not critiquing, just learning :)  Alfonso's link with the under proofing, just about right and over proofing - big lightbulbs for me.

I'm trying to ignore the lure of the SJSD's but Kya and Lily are hoping for shares.  Scritches to Barney, my girls are quite intrigued.

~D

My husband is from Dublin and his sister and best friend live in London. My mom does research in the Lake District most summers (she writes about Wordsworth and Coleridge and Blake and those types!). England seems to have a pretty awesome sourdough movement happening. A lot of the best sources I find seem to come from the UK in general, and England specifically.