Baguettes?

The baguette, that classic French bread, is a milestone in every baker’s life. Some achieve it. Some fall flat. Some never try. I tried. I did not succeed, but I learned. Hopefully next time I’ll get it. Or, at the very least, closer.

I started out with a recipe I found online at https://myloveofbaking.com/sourdough-baguettes/. It was not the most complex of the recipes I saw but nor was it the simplest. It had things that I look for – weights on the ingredients being one of the most important ones. The main reason I chose it was that it was one of the few recipes I saw that was for 2 baguettes – most are for 6. When I’m getting started and trying things out I want to keep it small and this let me do that without any added fuss.

So I took the recipe and made the dough. Relatively straightforward and nothing too out of the ordinary. It’s a simple no-knead starting with an autolyse followed by 3 stretch and folds. After that it changes the usual order around somewhat by going into the fridge overnight before shaping. Bring it out of the fridge, let it come to room temperature and rise, shape it slowly, carefully, and in 3 steps with rests in between. A final rest and then into the oven. Again, in 3 steps.

My baguettes resting after shaping.

You’d think with the detailed instructions – and video – it would be easy to get it right. You’d be wrong. First off, I’m an idiot. I didn’t think that perhaps the couche I was using was longer than any baking pan I might own. Had I thought about that first issue I might not have run into the second one which was that I made them way too thin. I didn’t want to ruin the whole thing by trying to reshape them so I just sort of folded the ends in to make them shorter. That’s why they kind of look like lacrosse sticks.

The crumb

After all that I’ve got to say that it was worth it. The crust was amazing, the crumb was beautiful – just right for spreading butter or jam, and the taste had just the right amount of sourness. Hopefully I’ve learned from my mistakes and will to a better job of shaping my baguettes. I’ll let you know.

The last 70% post

A while ago I made the first of my 70% attempts. This is the 5th, and final, one (at least that I’m going to post about.) At some point in the not too distant future I hope to put up a recipe that you can follow but here’s the verdict on my final loaf from the series.

Finishing off the series meant doing 70% hydration with 3 of of the AP flour replaced with vital wheat gluten, kneading it in the stand mixer, and baking it on the pizza stone.

I was kind of surprised by the result. The dough was harder to shape than the no-knead and didn’t come out of the proofing basket easily. It didn’ rise in the oven the way I had hoped – it almost didn’t rise at all. It’s a decent loaf but not one I want to make again.

I guess this means I need to go back to the no-knead and tweak it. I’ll play with levains and autolyse. I’ll try mixing and letting it sit and mixing it and folding it. I can’t promise that I won’t show intermediate steps (I did start this blog to document what I was doing!) but I can’t promise that I will. The adventure will bake on.

Challah if you need me!

I decided it’s been a long time since I made challah. I decided I wanted to try to figure out how to take an existing recipe and adapt it to use my starter. I decided this on Friday morning which meant that I didn’t have a lot of time if I wanted challah on the dinner table on Friday evening.

Given the time constraint I decided I’d stick with my usual recipe but substitute 300g of starter for 150g of each of flour and water. I also decided to add 20g of gluten since I was using AP flour. I got my starter ready in the morning – taking the 100g of discard and feeding it with 100g each of flour and water. I had been a bit lazy in the morning and took my time getting ready so I didn’t get this done until around 8:30 in the morning.

At about 1:30 I came upstairs from my home office (I would’ve preferred to wait till 2 or even 2:30 but I had a 2:15 meeting so I couldn’t push it back any more) and started to make the dough. I took all of my ingredients: the flour, gluten, water, eggs, salt, oil, yeast, and starter and put them in my stand mixer and got it started. It was having trouble absorbing all the flour (this is a hard dough which makes it so much easier to shape and work with) so I added more water. And some more water. I finally got the dough to the right point but I’d added almost 100g of water more than normal. And the mixer was struggling to knead it. So I took it out of the mixer and kneaded it by hand.

When I felt I had kneaded it enough and the dough was stretchy enough to see through without tearing I put it back in the bowl of the stand mixer and covered it with plastic wrap. Understand that the dough at this point is about 1/3 the volume of the bowl of my stand mixer. I figured I’d be back up to take a look at it in 45 minutes or an hour. But my meeting ran a bit long and I didn’t get back up for closer to 90 minutes. When I finally got back up the dough had risen so much it was cresting over the top of the bowl. Not anything I was expecting.

The braided challah ready to proof.

I took the dough out of the bowl and deflated it. I formed it into 8 long snakes and started to braid the challah. If you look at the picture above you can see I used 2 techniques. To be perfectly honest I’m not 100% sure which I like more but since it doesn’t affect the flavor I don’t mind trying new braiding techniques. Once they were braided I gave them an egg wash and set them to proof.

After proofing and ready to go into the oven.

Once they were proofed (and given how much they had risen during the first rise I was checking on them every 10 minutes or so!) I gave them another egg wash and put them into a 425°F/215°C degree oven for 30 minutes. They came out gorgeously browned and significantly bigger than they went in. I mention the latter because I’m not too used to them growing this much when I use the straight recipe.

The crumb

As you can see from the picture it looks like a challah should when you cut into it. When I saw how much it had grown I was half expecting huge air bubbles but thankfully it didn’t have that. I couldn’t taste the sourdough in it – not too surprising since I didn’t give it too much time – but I could tell that the starter had a huge impact on the baking. Next time, I think I’ll try cutting the yeast in half.

Most importantly, the challah became delicious french toast for Saturday’s breakfast!

French toast!

Pizza Hardware – the Stone

If you’ve ever been in the kitchen at a professional bakery or seen the oven in a good pizza place you’ll know why the pizza stone is an essential tool in every baker’s life. Professional bread ovens (and pizza ovens are an offshoot of that) have relatively small openings with heat coming from the top and bottom. They’re lined with a heavy stone that stores the heat and brings the heat source as close to the bread (or pizza) as possible.

Pizza baking on the stone.

Since our home ovens need to be more versatile they make trade offs. The opening in your home oven is huge in comparison. The distance between the heat source and the item being heated is relatively large and that’s a good thing. For roasting a chicken. It’s not so good for baking a bread or a pizza.

A pizza stone is the tool that we use to turn our home ovens into something closer to what the professionals have. Can you bake a loaf of bread or a pizza without one? Sure. Will it be better with one? Definitely.

When you’re cooking at home you know not to open the oven unless you absolutely need to. Every time you open that door you’re letting heat out. I know a lot of recipes that will have you preheat the oven significantly higher than it needs to be and then lower the temperature when you put the food in (or shortly thereafter) as a way to try and make up for that. You ever wonder why a pizzeria doesn’t worry about opening the oven to take out a slice or put in the next pie? Because the stone lining the oven is maintaining the temperature even while heat is escaping through that open door. A pizza stone gives us that.

When I make pizza I preheat my oven to 550°F/285°C and I turn it on, with the stone in, an hour before I’m ready to bake. I want not just the oven to be hot, I want the stone to reach that temperature. I want the dough to go into the oven and get that high heat right away. That first hit of heat kicks the yeast into high gear and gives me the airy crust on the outside of my pizza, the occasional bubble that is so yummy under the toppings. That’s what the pizza stone buys you. And that’s why you should buy a pizza stone.