Tartine revisted
The Tartine method is how I got started in sourdough baking and is still the basis for most of my sourdough loaves in its intention of making a open crumb bread with a less sour flavor. Lately I had been playing it safe by keeping the hydration at 75% and not risking over fermenting. I have made good bread with a poorly maintained starter but I had become sloppy and careless with my starter during the winter doldrums and my bread was losing some luster. Instead of just making my usual bread this time I attempted to make The Tartine country bread with the new to me info from one of their bakers. Jennifer Lathams Intagram version with a double fed levain. I intend to get the audio only version of the book she and Chad put out recently. It no longer includes the leaven in the autolyse and salt is not added until enough water has been incorporated to make a very extensible dough. The additional water is added in stages by feel alone and is not measured. The dough ends up so loose that gentle shaping using the stitching method (which I suck at) is required. The final shaping is more like another pre shape as the dough is folded in half as it is placed in the basket. Her series of videos are worth watching for little tips I picked up along the way, like how much tension to put in the in the pre shape and flouring the top of it instead of the bench before shaping. It also helps to see just how the dough should look in general.
This loaf is 10% home milled winter wheat with the large bran bits sifted out and Wheat Montana AP. Total flour is 500 grams. The hydration ended up somewhere just above 80%. The double fed levain with timely folding did seem to goose the fermentation and increase the overall volume. I followed her advice and rather than bake straight from the fridge like I usually do, I took it out while the oven and stone heated up and it seemed to be more relaxed before baking with good oven spring.
Once in a great while I feel certain that I hit the sweet spot on fermentation. For me that means the dough is on the verge of going past the point of no return. It has a glossy, soft crumb and a crust that is not hard but a joy to chew. On those rare occasions the flavor, texture and the crust are truly at their best and the toast it makes is next level stuff. I just wish it wasn't so elusive and diminished my other decent bakes so much so that they seem not quite right.
The folded in half shaping changed the pattern of crumb from the circular method. The crumb may not be quite what I wished it to be appearance wise but it is still a very satisfying bake.
I don't like to heat up the stone and stove for just one loaf, so a rack of Boubsa baggies was prepped and baked to be eaten right away.
Our chickens have decided that the worst of winter may finally be over and are laying eggs again. I hope they are right. Eggs without a dash of hot sauce. I don't think so.
Happy baking and may the vaccine find you all.
Don
Comments
I believe Chad advises this technique if the ferment has gone over. Many think his levains work better when not sticking to his guideline of a modest 20% rise as advised in his book anyway. How his levain only rises 20% in that timescale when a lot of people report a more generous rise even when sticking to his levain build advice for time and temperature sounds off. Perhaps purposefully getting a more rigorous rise in the first build followed by a quicker lower ratio feed for a second build gains in both strength and flavour. Best of both worlds. I recently recommended this to my friend.
Marvellous looking bakes and those are some of the best baguettes i've seen.
I will have to get the book(audio) to understand it more but am guessing it is like a two stage rocket fueled for high orbit:-) My normal starter is mostly white AP and 5% fresh milled rye it is pretty reliable and strong enough for me. I found the half white half whole wheat that Chads uses to be powerful and fast moving but too temperamental for occasional use. I intend to try your low percentage long ferment loaf one of these days when the time is right for me.
I tried a different version of a double fed levin experiment during the rye CB when I had an active rye starter where I made a pain au leviain with half rye starter and half my normal white starter added to an autolysed white flour mix that yielded surprisingly good results. Maybe that was the last time I had a loaf as good as this one was. Once again it was pushed to the breaking point.
Thanks for the baggie compliment. The yeasted breads seem better suited to my short attention span. When it comes to sourdough the waiting is the hardest part.
I'm liking the idea of trying it this way. That crumb has persuaded me. I'd be well happy with that!
What I also like about the method is getting the first build very active overnight and while the second build is fermenting one can get the autolyse done.
Wonderful breads all of them Don. Your baguettes are keeping their extra length I see, you haven’t gone back to stand length which is great.
Do you think you’ll continue to use this new shaping method that results in the different crumb pattern?
How about the warming up of the dough rather than baking from cold, will you do that in the future as well?
Let’s hope all of us get vaccinated soon, your country is far ahead of ours, we have made a change to separating first and second doses by 4 months to try to get shots in more people’s arms faster which I think is a good idea given how still relatively scare the vaccine is here.
Benny
for the kind words. I don't blog very often because only the home runs and the good plays make it on highlights. The reality is I eat a lot of mediocre sourdough bread with a few notable exceptions. Thanks to the Bouabsa and the CB I am much more consistent with baguettes.
Unless the dough looks over proofed I am going let them warm up and relax for a bit from now on. I have found that 15 hours is about the right amount of refrigeration for me in general. I always get some growth in the fridge but it is still domed when I take it out to bake and many times that is under proofed. If it is flat with bubbles showing It has gone too far so somewhere in between is what I shoot for.
The fold as it goes into the basket does make for a taller profile and but I think the open crumb is compromised and maybe it's more suited to a round loaf which I seldom make because the slices aren't that practical for toast and sandwiches.
I was lucky to get my first shot already and it's quite a relief although I think I had Covid and was quite sick early last year, before testing was available, so I probably had some immunity. The good ole USA is going from worst to first with the vaccine and will probably have excess soon because many of the knuckle draggers are going to refuse a shot. Maybe they can send some up your way. As Winston Churchill said "America can always be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities."
Don
I’ve had the experience several times when my dough in the fridge had actually contracted, you could even see the slump in the center with the edges actually higher than the center. Surprisingly my last bake had this yet somehow still baked up just fine. I’m going to try to push proof again today and was thinking that I would do a much shorter cold retard of only several hours and then bake and see if that affects the crumb, oven spring and sourness of the bread. I haven’t yet baked any hearth loaves warm, I may have to try that eventually as well.
I’ll have to look up the videos you’re referring to, I’m not quite sure what the folding in half going into the banneton looks like.
Yes it does seem that COVID-19 was around much earlier in NA than most may have realized. We were in Japan on a cruise Nov 2019 around the time the pandemic was probably starting up. I’d say about 50% of the passengers were from China. Both my brother in law and my partner got really really sick. We wonder if they both had COVID-19 now in retrospect.
Stay well and glad to hear you recovered from whatever it was you had and that you’ve now received the first shot.
Benny
Shaping Tartine
Thanks for providing the link Don. OK I’ve seen that shaping up to but not including the folding in half. I can see how that folding in half would cause the crumb pattern that you got Dan. Very interesting. So what type of dough would this shaping be best for? I know bakers talk about shaping differently depending on certain dough characteristics but to tell you the honest truth, I only shape one way and haven’t bothered to learn any other way.
Benny
quite often depending on the dough in hand as Trevor says. I seldom work with dough as supple or hydrated as the one in the video. The stitching and the last fold appears to put the final tension in the outer skin of the loaf. If I had one knock against an otherwise great video series it's that she didn't show the obligatory crumb photo. I would say I seldom even proof to the level of gas bubbles apparent in her ready to proof loaves.
I’ve really been pushing proofing lately and have been happy with the results. However, I do have difficulty as I have found with shaping anything past 60% rise (aliquot jar measured) so I bulk to that and then do a final warm proof before cold retard. My shaping skills would need to improve to shape anything more proofy than that. I suppose I should review what Trevor recommends for shaping techniques for different doughs and crumb. I have been so focused on lacy lately that I haven’t bothered trying to work on anything else.
Your boule looks great. And if it were an open crumb you yearned for in this bread, you certainly have that down, regardless of your mild protest. I've yet to make a Tartine bread, except for the baguettes (wow, didn't see that one coming!), so I've only seen the work of others as well as a decade old short demo video of the man at work. The baggies, of course, look great too.
I received my 2nd "poke" on Feb. 1st, so I'm all dosed up.
Good to hear that you’re fully vaccinated Alan, my partner and I are both as well.
I too haven’t actually made a Tartine loaf, the closest I have come is when I made a koji rice porridge bread.
Benny
is understandable so I was hesitant to shout it out but it was nice to cross the threshold. Even though I am barely old enough I still feel like others on the front lines probably should have been jabbed before me. I mean honestly it depends on where you live and who you know and downright luck. My 90 yr old mother in another state got hers after me. We are so close to being done with this I can hardly wait to see my family again. I am so tired of hiding in the trees waiting for the insanity to blow over.
Tartine Bread is the baseline for me as far as methods go. We really should do a CB someday as an homage to one of the cornerstones of our craft. If I am talking to the right guy that is;-)
I second this motion to do a Tartine CB, the Tartine loaf is so famous it would probably be a hit.
I'll be posting the next CB in a week or three. I already have my homework and most of my testing done, and the subject matter is planned out, so I'll stick to plan for this one. But the one after this one seems like a good target and I'l have to check to see whether Dan's already gone down that path...
(I said move over once, move over twice...My baby's traveling on the one after 909). Instant recall. My brain works, for good or bad, like that!
do the oat porridge bread bread from Tartine 3 but it was the Maurizio's Pefect Loaf version. The Basic Country Bread from the original book is a pretty universal palette for a lot of other breads.
From the same source as the recipe above I found a link to a farmer/miller out in Washington that provides some of the flour that Tartine uses in the bakery. They do sell to the general public and it must be good stuff but it is pricy. Even more than the French magic dust. I hope the future of the bread supply chain has more of this in it. https://cairnspring.com/
All the loaves look excellent inside and out. I really like the crust on the batard. It almost looks glazed.
I use a graniteware pan on a stone for a steam set up and when the fermentation is good I get blisters and a shine.
Don, thank you so much for that one sentence "It no longer includes the leaven in the autolyse and salt is not added until enough water has been incorporated to make a very extensible dough."
It made such a difference to my weekend bake to hold back the salt until after the bassinage. I'm a convert now!
-Jon
It goes against the conventional wisdom of many professional bakers but a lot of the bakers I follow do it in some form or another. I may have been mistaken about the levin in the autolyse but the effect of delaying the salt was an eye opener to me.
Tartine certainly was instrumental in my development as well. I'm just adding my voice to the chorus here but thought I'd share a loaf I made a few months ago when I went back and was exploring some of the variation in philosophy, namely young levain and short bulk. I had already been going for nearly 100% rise at the time so I was very curious about 20% and a very young levain. I had already committed to 100% whole grain at this point and so compromised with a 50% loaf, shown below.