Tartine Country Bread - as baguettes (what else?)
About a year and a half ago, The New York Times featured the formula for the Tartine Country Bread in their food section. I dutifully copied it off and even more dutifully dropped it in the back of my pack of formulae for "sometime in the future". Finally deciding to make the loaf as baguettes, I didn't stop to consider that there is a Tartine baguette formula also and that it is quite different than for the Country Bread, and with a much lower hydration.
But that would ruin my narrative and my string of converting boules and batards to baguettes and vice versa. So off I went to see some notes on TFL about it. And I discovered that txfarmer knocked it off way back in 2010, years before I was around these parts. And to quote her, verbatim, "Who's up for shaping this dough into baguettes?". Well, I am!
With a new oven to learn to deal with (that's another tome for another day), I made it last week and had some slight difficulties. Nothing earth-shattering but it could have been better. Was the problem the formula as a baguette, me, the new oven, or any random combination. Who knows just yet. The bread didn't get the standard bloom and oven spring that I've come to expect, but it also is far from entering into the Frankenstein range of bakes.
Rescaled from the original weight down to ~1500g for each bake, on my second attempt I dropped the overall hydration down from 77% to 75% to make the dough a bit more manageable, and it probably worked in my favor, although I'm not quite sure about that. Living on a couche overnight in the refrigerator, the dough shed a lot of moisture. Even with the amount of flour that I used to dust the couche (still quite nominal), the dough was a bit resistant to cleanly flipping from couche to hand peel, but not much of an issue. Just not a completely clean transition.
I'm also surprised at how long these baguettes baked for, 13 minutes with steam and then another 19 after that. That's a pretty long bake at 450dF for baguettes. The one batard (how could I resist?) took an additional 6 minutes.
3x300g baguettes, 1x550g batard, created using my standard methodology of 300 French Folds, bulk retard for x hours and then divide, shape, couche and retard until bake time. The lead picture is from the first bake.
Pre shaped and waiting to become something...
alan
Comments
no matter what the recipe! These look exceptional as well. Just super baking all the way around.- bet the crumb is nicve too- jiust like always.
Well done and Happy baking Alan
Gorgeous crust! What's your steaming method?
1 part Sylvia's steaming towel. You can find it in the TFL search box in the upper right of the web page.
1 part pan filled with lava rocks, which is in the oven when it it turned on.
The steaming towel pan goes in ~15 minutes before the dough. 2 cups of hot water get poured over the lava rocks just after the dough is loaded. Somewhere between 12-13 minutes with steam. Both of these reside below the baking deck and just above the lower heating element.
alan
Thanks for the details. Who needs a steam-injected oven when you can get results like that at home?
They look nice! I love the blisters!
Those all look great to me! I'm sure they tasted as good as they looked. Congrats on your new oven. What did you end up getting?
Thanks Ian. Well...the long oven story synthesized down to a few lines: I bought a GE electric range with a double oven last Oct, 2014. Over the course of a year it had a recurring undiagnosable problem with the oven light continually burning out. Customer Relations for GE stated multiple times that they repair, not replace ranges. So I went to the Better Business Bureau and they put someone in "the office of the chairman" in touch with me. After a few back and forths, she agreed to replace the oven. The new one is a convection version of the other one, as they discontinued what I had. These are the first two bakes with this oven.
alan