Lessons in baking – ASSLB

That stands for Alfanso’s Sesame Semolina Levain Batards.

Our friend’s new son-in-law is an amateur baker, much as most of us around these parts are, but with less experience than a great many of us here at the TFL ranch. When he heard that I was a (cough, cough) real baker he was quite interested in hooking up with me for some tips/baking/knowledge/fill-in-the-blank.  So yesterday the crew spent the day here.  And I created a baking lesson using David Snyder’s Sourdough Italian Bread formula.  As I’ve changed around a few things, I’ve rechristened it as above.  Well, at last in my mind...

Now I knew up front that this was more complicated than a simple flour, water salt and IDY formula, but I thought that it would be a good experience to expose him to something a bit more complex.  Although he is relatively new at this game, he was quite familiar with just about any term that I bandied about.

We did things quite out of order so that we could perform everything in one day.  When they arrived, the first order of business was to pop a couche’s worth of the batards into the already steamed oven.  I’d prepped a batch on Saturday so that we could have the full experience, and into the refrigerator for a long cold proof they did go.  

While the batards were under steam I mixed the next batch for “autolyse” and barely had to juggle the baking with that next batch.  (Yes, purists, I know that the autolyse contained the levain, but as you may be witness to, the quotes were around the dang word.).  And so it went until we came pretty much full circle and loaded the day’s now shaped and couched batards into the refrigerator.  During the latter half of that phase I went ahead and demoed a build of my “forever” levain as though it was levain to be used in that mix.

So the three steps to make these batards were performed in reverse order, but it afforded him the opportunity to see it all in one day.  And I packed him and family off for home with the formula sheet and some other supporting documentation about levain maintenance and builds, the two remaining batards that we did not consume, some dried levain flakes for eventual reconstituting, and a little Tupperware of ~100g of my “forever” levain.

And so this morning, as any hungry and fidgety baker would do, I fired up the oven and loaded the three batards from yesterday’s lesson into it.  And although I don’t have any pictures of yesterday’s bake, I did dutifully snap a few from today.  I’ll pass these onto him as well, and also to demonstrate that consistency of product can be achieved with practice.  Can’t prove it without the evidence, but these are just about exact replica’s of yesterday’s bake, and they are just about exacts of my bake from back in early May.  

And in a way, perhaps that is the most important lesson of the day – that with practice and sticking to plan, one can duplicate over and over again what they create. 

Steam released and rotated - say cheese...

The Kids cooling down

alan