February 11, 2024 - 12:12pm
baguette pre-weight vs length
I read everywhere that a pre-weight for shaping baguettes is about 350 grams. However, I am not getting the traditional 22 inch baguette with this weight. More like 18 inches. I starter, flour, water salt with a long fermentation and bake in a wood oven on retained heat. Before the wood oven, I couldn't fit a 22 inch traditional sized baguette in my home oven, but not that I can, I would love to get there. The baguettes I getting are awesome, but wondering if anyone else needs to up the pre-weight to get a 22 in baguette and a final weight of 250 or slightly higher weight? Maybe my baguettes are just bigger around and shorter and I need to push the length for a skinner baguette? Any advice would be great.
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I can't help with your question, but I bet a lot of people would like to know more about your oven and to see some pictures of your baguettes, short or not.
TomP
Salutations, DSW.
I to favor the 340-350g baguette. However I find that 16" works well for my oven. That being said, I must say I am also amored by the length to girth ratio of this combination.
I generally get 270-300 g of dough to roll out to 16/17”. All my stone will allow. I would think 50 more grams should provide enough material to get you to 22”.
If you’re having trouble getting the gluten to let you roll out that far, maybe final shape with a 15 minute rest in the middle? Roll out to 16, rest 15, finish rolling out to 22.
Good grief what are you proofing them on?
Envious
Great suggestion and that is what I had to do today. We will see how the final product turns out. The gluten was super tight and elastic and it needed a rest.
I'm not sure if you're saying you can do a 22 inch now or that you'd like to some time later. Ie, it's not clear if you have the space to go that long. If you do have the space then 350 is plenty for pre weight in fact I usually get about 260-270g final and I always do a 350g 23 inch load. You just need to thin it out and you need to push the pre-length and an extra inch or so (hence the 23 inch load to account for shrinkage). I imagine you have really plump loaves. In reality a traditional baguette is thin and that is one of the big challenges - that is to expand a very thin loaf as the physics required gets harder and harder the thinner you go. Think about blowing a balloon animal. They make hand pumps because those thin balloons are near impossible to inflate without extra force !