13th set of baguettes au levain

Thanks for your kind comments Elsie.  Yes it has only been my partner and I eating the baguettes.  If it wasn’t for the pandemic I would be seeing our friends much more often and they they would have been having some of the them.  I also need to find some sort of paper bag or reusable canvas bag to transport baguettes in to bring someone a baguette.

James, I’m glad this might help you.  It’s funny that I hadn’t posted an update on my progress with baguettes in my blog, but it is easy to think that everyone who has any interest is already looking there.  But I realize that the CB thread is just huge and can be hard to follow.

I hope you have good success with your baguettes.  I seem to be the only one using this formula with any regularity in the CB but I found it to be a great balance of some complexity from the levain and the clean wheat flavour of the flour.

If I could just say a few things which you might already know that are some of the things I have learned from my 13 sets of baguettes I’ve baked and from the knowledge gleaned from all the bakers in the CB, they would be the following:

Use low protein flour - 10% for me seems to be ideal.

Underdevelop the gluten in the dough otherwise you’ll find the dough’s elasticity fighting you when you’re doing final shaping and stretching.

Don’t allow bulk fermentation to go past 30% rise as that might make shaping more difficult and compromise oven spring and ear formation.  However, that being said, I got amazing crumb at 35-40% rise.

My baguettes benefitted from the addition of 1% diastatic malt, this sounds high but it does help with browning of the crust.

Initial oven spring is so important so have a good steam set up and bake hot.  Others have found success with lower temperatures but I found 500ºF for at least the first 13 mins on steam worked for me.

I found that for my current skills and current flour, pre-shaping as a loose boule gave me the best shaping experience, others found loose rolls to work for them particularly if they were doing really long baguettes.  Mine are more long batards.

I’m sure that there’s a lot more in the CB but those few things stand out for me as pearls I have learned.

Please jump in and post to the CB, you’ll have a lot of help there if you in fact need any.  You are obviously an accomplished baker.

Thanks Ian, for some reason my crumb on baguettes is outclassing my crumb on batards and I’ve been at batards much longer.

Thanks David, I’ve been working hard to try to get my baguettes to where they are now.  I still have work to do on the outward appearance but I have to say I’m pleased with the crumb I’ve been getting quite consistently.

In regards to the bulk fermentation, typically my bulk temperature is about 82ºF and this dough usually takes about 4-4.5 hours at this temperature to reach 30% rise based on the aliquot jar.  Keep in mind that there is a tiny amount of IDY at 0.07% in addition to the levain so it moves along fairly quickly.

I do like the clean wheat flavour of these baguettes with the added complexity from the levain.  So they are more complex than the Bouabsa that I have baked once before and I like that I’m using my starter but avoiding what seems to be thicker crust and chewier crumb from levain only baguettes.  I prefer a thin crisp crust and a softer more tender chew to the crumb and Abel’s slightly modified hybrid formula gives me that.

Stay safe and enjoy your baking too David.

Benny

Glenn I hope you have some luck with it, not sure if you’ve baked baguettes before, but they are a challenge so don’t give up if you don’t have a perfect bake, keep trying.  Please post your bake somewhere, a great place would be the Community Bake - Baguettes this is where we have been sharing our bakes and learning from each other’s bake and experiences.  I know I wouldn’t have achieved what I have to this point without the help of the other bakers here in that community bake.

Benny

Sorry Glenn, my mistake, that CB thread has become so huge I didn’t remember that you posted there and have done baguettes before.

Edited to add:  I’m going to back off the bulk fermentation with my next bake down to 25% to see if I can still get the open crumb but also enhance the oven spring, ears and grigne.

Glenn, you think they rose 40-50% and still got that oven spring, that’s really great actually.  I’m gradually dialing back on the bulk rise from 35-40% and my next bake down to 25%.  I felt when I did 40’ish that the oven spring suffered although the crumb was great.  It looks like your oven spring at 50% was better than mine at 30%.  What is your oven set up and what temperatures are you baking them at.  I’m very impressed, good bake.

What do you think of the flavour, crust, crumb texture etc. 

Good job especially with your distraction, sorry to hear about the broken iPhone.