Baking with my granddaughter
Yesterday we were looking after three of four grandchildren because my daughter and son in law and the oldest grandson were involved in "International Water Count" of birds which always takes place mid January practically worldwide.
I decided to involve my eleven and half year old granddaughter into baking and she was also very keen on baking. She is an incredible girl playing trumpet and riding horses. We made two loaves of bread and three baguettes. The boules were baked in wood fired oven while baguettes were baked in electric steam oven.
Recently my neighbor asked me to prepare two big boules for their party and gave me a mixture of five grains flour: wheat 50%, spelt 20%, rye type 1250 12%, barley 10% and durum 8%. I found that this mixture gives a prefect bread when you add 50% of AP flour, so in the final dough the flour mixture is:
whole grain wheat | 25% |
whole grain spelt | 10% |
rye type 1250 | 6% |
whole grain barley | 5% |
durum | 4% |
AP flour | 50% |
The dough had 78% hydration with 15% of @100% hydration starter (AP flour only).
The dough for baguettes had 20% of preferment (poolish 16 hours old), 15% whole grain spelt, 5% whole grain rye and rest AP flour and about 2g of fresh yeast. we prepared the dough in the Bosch Universal mixer. The hydration was only 63% because I din't want that my granddaughter would have problems with sticky dough.
Shaping baguette
Shaping baguette
Finished baguette
My plan was to involve my granddaughter in the whole process from dough preparation to baking and also baguettes shaping and scoring.
She was mixing the dough and did most of S&F and preshaped her boule. Before every phase I showed her how to do it and she got it right away. So with a little bit of additional coaching she was able to shape and score baguettes.I showed her the signs of dough at the end of BF phase and she learned also how to shape a boule.
Scoring the boule
Final result - the boule she scored for the first time in her life with serrated knife
The crumb shot
We baked blueberry muffins for the dessert.
I must admit that this was an awesome experience for me and her. She was so proud and happy to get so nice results. Her boule was slightly elliptical due to my fault when loading the boule into WFO. Can you imagine something better than this kind of adventure for a gradfather? I think not. I was the proudest and happiest grandpa on the world yesterday!
Happy baking, Joze