December 13, 2015 - 9:32am
Introduction
Hi!
I started baking bread 21 months ago - in Feb. 2014 I went straight to baguettes, and was baking pretty good ones after 3 months: (these are short so as to fit my oven/stone).
I received "Flour Water Salt Yeast" for Christmas and have had fun trying different things. I recently built my own starter and tried some of the levain bread recipes with mixed results. I'll be posting those efforts and asking for help.
Cheers!
Bart
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Floyd Mann is our host. Welcome! The baguettes look great!
Ford
I'm sure with shaping & baking like that you won't have any issues with a natural levian!
-Gordon
Welcome to TFL, Bart. It is often said on TFL and elsewhere (and now these days by me repeating this dictum many times here as well!), that baguette shaping and scoring is one of the harder aspects of the whole bread thang to get down well.
You've got a great head start. Lovely shaping and particularly wonderful scoring. Keep posting!
If and when you are ready, the folks here can point you in the direction of a handful of baguette formulae that are tried and true.
alan
I made a lot of progress from my first attempt using generic flour and baking on a cookie sheet:
ps...how come inserted images are not displaying? I had to add a link to the sentence because the picture is not showing. What I see is a generic placeholder.
Bart,
Even your first attempt has a lot of good shaping characteristics. Don't get too wrapped up on using fancy flours. There is certainly nothing wrong with using them and if you want to move in that direction, by all means do so. They probably have more going for them than the "generic" labels. However, I use Pillsbury and Gold Medal whenever I can, and I'm quite happy with my results.
There is a tutorial somewhere in TFL that steps through how to post a picture. It is a bit kluge at first but then eventually becomes second nature. A key point is that a photo (except for the lead photo that appears in the Bread Browser, if you choose to use one) must be uploaded to the TFL library before it can be inserted.
alan
Alan,
Thank you for the comments, and the steps to upload an image. However, when I click upload, I get an "AJAX/Server" error message....arghhh.