Consistency. Hitting stride, Update: 12/16

Jeffrey Hamelman's pain au levain with mixed sourdough starters.  I've made this before as both baguettes and batards.  So this is nothing new now, although it has still only been a small handful of bakes so far.  I like the concept of the two starters, one stiff and one quite liquid.  As much for an interesting change of pace as well as the process.

What is important to me is consistency.  I want to need to feel as though I can create and then recreate, pretty faithfully, the same breads time after time.  At this point, after a little over two years of home baking, I probably have about 20 different breads or more in my rotation, some revisited way more frequently than others.  But it is the ability to come back to, to return to a prior bread, and then be able to do it again.  To make it look as though it could have been part of that prior bake.  That is an accomplishment that I can feel good about.  And it's happening with regularity now.

There's a ton about baking, even some of the basics, that is still beyond my grasp at this stage, but that's okay.  I seem to have found my niche, my wavelength where I can operate well.  I'll learn more over time, but as I'm not obsessive about any of this, that "over time" will have a long duration.  And I'm quite comfortable with that.  I'm not that young impetuous kid anymore.  He lives in the past.  Baking and learning slow as I go is my present, and hopefully my future too.

Just of the heck of it, here are a pair of pictures from the prior bake in October...

Update: 12/16

That consistency continues to permeate from one bake to the next, further evidence that repetitive results can be achieved.  

Here is a batch of Hamelman's Pain au Levain with WW (with a single stiff bread flour starter here), also something that I've made as both baguettes and batards and posted previously.  These completed bulk fermenting on the bench at 11 PM Monday night and then retarded as bulk.  Tuesday early AM they were divided, shaped, couched and then returned to the refrigerator.  I got around to baking these on Tuesday evening at ~9 PM.  As usual, directly from retard into oven.  Therefore these had a 22 hour retard in total, well beyond what I think is the recommended retard time frame.

I wonder at what point the acids in the levain start to break down the gluten structure.  These may have shown the first effects of that, but I'm not good enough or knowledgeable enough to know that yet.