alfanso's blog

In this edition of what the heck can I do with a tub of dough (hmm, redundant,no?), I decided to tackle Ken’s other batard, which he calls Ken’s Artisan Country Brown.  Just for clarity’s sake, something I neglected to do in my write up about the Country Blonde breads last week, these are also not based on anything printed in the FWSY book.

Usually it takes at least one, if not a few iterations to tinker with and get it “right”, but this time it seems as if I got it “right” on the first try.  Either I’m getting a little lucky or getting a little better, I’ll take it either way!

A 1500g mix yielded two ~500g batards and two ~250g baguettes, too much for my oven peel to handle in one bake, so it was split up in two, with an oven recovery time of about 20 minutes between the baguettes coming out and the batards going in.

When I made my big batch last time, also 1500g of the Country Blonde dough, the one batard weighed in at just over 750g, and while that may be fine for a commercial enterprise, for just little old me and my home oven, I thought that it was too big, hence the two 500g batards this time.

As is my too often cry, I wish that I had left the baguettes in for another half shade of color, but I think that I hit the nail on the head with the batards.  As is also my too often cry, I don’t yet have the heart to saw off a hunk of the batard and inspect its innards.
   
As with the prior Blonde batch, a 12 hour couched retard of the already shaped dough, and then directly into the oven for a bake.  For these smaller baguettes, 9 minutes of steam and baked for 20-22 minutes total.  All the while the still refrigerated batards remained comfortably swathed in their couche until it was their turn to bake.  Which naturally took longer, somewhere in the 26-29 minute range at 470dF.

Once more, here is a picture of Ken's Country Brown batards, from his FWSY book

 The batards:

The blisters:

The grigne:

The baguettes:

In this edition of what the heck can I do with a tub of dough, I decided to tackle the fabulous batard known as Ken’s Artisan Country Blonde.  In the first attempt early this week, I mixed 1000 grams of dough and came up with two ~500g batards.  As an aside, I am a believer in couche rather than banneton proofing whenever possible.  I was pretty happy with the results for a first time out, as evidenced by the first photos.  

But I decided to up the ante AND sneak in some more baguettes, as improbable as that last part is to believe ;-) .  Upping the ante also meant trying to get a batard in the same weight range as what Ken sells, which is in the 750g vicinity.  So I made 1500g of dough, carved out ~750g or so for the batard and then divided the remainder into the two baguettes.  

A 4 hour bulk fermentation, refrigerated for the last hour, followed by divide and shape, and then a 12 hour couched and shaped retard.  Then directly into the 470F oven for a bake.  12 minutes of steam.  The baguettes baked for a surprisingly long 30 minutes total, and the batard for a mere few minutes more.  Even after removing the steaming tray and venting the oven while rotating the breads, there was still steam coming out of the vent from the residual hydration in the dough.  I would have liked to bake the baguettes to the next darker shade, but after 30 minutes I felt the desire to pull them before they might have burned.

Both the batard and the baguettes are oversized behemoths, although it might not be evident in those last two pictures.

Here is a picture of Ken's Country Brown, his whole wheat version.  It was the closest that I could find to a good picture of the Country Blonde.  From his FWSY book: 

Here is my first attempt at the Country Blonde at ~500g apiece:

And the blisters and crumb:

Today's haul.  Ken scores his Brown twice and his Blonde three times, and so I tried to keep mine consistent with his.  Baguettes took my standard 4 scores.  Need to get a better score on the batard, but the baguettes opened up just dandy!  Batard at ~750g, baguettes at ~375g each:

I better watch myself or I might just get hooked on batards and kiss my baguette phase goodbye.  Naaahh, on second thought, I guess they can play nice and coexist!

alan

 Why yes, I am.  But this time, I had to tear myself away from my standard Baguette Crusade.  My wife wanted me to try making a batard out of the same dough so that she could slice pieces large enough to ensure that the bread would serve as more than just a bite-sized snack.  And I had just enough left over for a skinny cross-hatched baguette.

The batard shaping was suspiciously simple, considering that I haven't shaped one since, oh, 2007, just prior to my self imposed 6+ year hiatus from baking.  Proofed on a couche instead of a banneton, and dusted with raw flour before proofing, for that "rustic" look.  The raw flour jazz is something that I rarely do.  But in the spirit of trying to reproduce a bread close to my model R-P WW Levain, dust them I did.  That model is also baked dark, and I believe that I succeeded at doing so here.

alan

Recently I had an urge to try to recreate one of my favorite breads.  This one originated in Ken’s Artisan Bakery in Portland, OR.  To me it tastes almost like a dessert or sweet treat.  Eaten fresh, toasted, whatever, and with a slathering of butter or cream cheese across the top, the sweetness of the raisins just pop out on the taste buds.  It has more whole grain than any of the other baguettes I’ve made at home so far, and uses a stiff rather than a liquid levain.

A few differences to these include a “pre-shape" right out of the refrigerator as a square rather than cylindrical, a very short rest before final shaping and cross hatched scoring rather than the traditional baguette scoring.

This was my third attempt and I feel as though I am coming close to reproducing the original.  Well, as close as my taste buds will help me recall.  My first was working out the details, second was ironing out some of the procedures, and this attempt was the cleanup version, where I tried to make the baguettes shorter and more torpedo-like than traditional baguette.  These are actually about 12" long, although you wouldn't know if from the photos.

I still have a bit of work to do on the shaping, but think that I am almost there.

Here is my take.

And here is the only picture of Ken’s original version that I can locate, from his bakery website.

As the famous saying goes: “Man cannot live by Raisin Pecan bread alone”.  In between my attempts at the baguette, I decided to run a SJSD batch, but increase the volume by 25%, thereby making larger versions of David Snyder’s original beauties.  I also changed the SJSD liquid levain build, following dabrownman’s build schedule, albeit in 1 stage rather than his 3, and to sub out all of the levain flours with a 50/50 WW/Rye mix of flours.  So maybe this qualifies as a SoSJSD (Son of San Joaquin Sour Dough)  baguette!

I'm getting pretty consistent scoring (especially now that I've left my cold proofing experiments in the rear view mirror), but I'm not getting those big ol' ears, which I so love, with any consistency.  I'll blame it on the new oven (I'm certainly not going to take responsibility, now am I?).  

Or maybe I'll just Blame it on the Bossa Nova https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XpWOBEZLEs

alan

I've been a little lazy about posting this but here is the third and final installment of trying to satisfy my curiosity.  Both of my earlier postings of these tests can be found on my blog here. 

I’ve reached my own, albeit impure and unscientific (neither calipers nor micrometers were used), conclusions with a little further testing about the effect of cold proofing shaped baguettes rather than letting them prove at room temperature.  At least for me, I am convinced of the effects in two ways.  Firstly, the cold proofing provides what I would refer to as a false positive. And secondly, cold proofing can be a useful tool in the service of the time/temp realm - as long as one takes the first point into consideration.  

My early finding and initial conclusion was that the cold proofed shaped dough took no longer to prove than had it stayed on the counter, which seemed to make no sense.  What I mean by false positive is that as the dough cooled down in the refrigerator, it retarded slower, as should be expected.  And the dough also chilled back to the point that the reliable finger dent test was what produced the false positive.  As we can basically agree, an underproofed dough should spring back faster that a proofed dough.  But as the chilled baguettes sprang back in the “standard” amount of time that we expect for proofed dough, it seemed ready to score and bake.  But it wasn’t.  My belief is that the chilled dough acted as though it was ready, due to the delayed spring-back, but in reality it was just reacting to cold and the spring-back was also retarded and slower.  And that gave the impression that it was properly proofed.

My second point is that as long as one can keep the false positive issue in mind, the cold proofing can be used to control the time element, and delay the finished proving of the dough.  Thereby allowing freedom to schedule a bake.  For instance, if there is only one baking deck in your oven, but you have two decks worth of dough to bake, the cold proofing can allow your oven, deck and steaming apparatus to recover to its next baking cycle while keeping the dough from overproofing.

Fromartz levain baguettes – these two photos are from the cold proofed test.

Fromartz levain baguettes – these next two are from the room temperature proofed test.  It is fairly evident that these had better oven spring and an improved overall look to the crust vs. the cold proofed version.

Bouabsa IDY baguettes – these three are the results of cold proofing.  The third photo is when I decided to really investigate a cross section of the bread.  Based on the excellent pictures from Ciril Hitz, and provided on TFL by Maverick last fall, I would have to rank the baguette as underproofed.  
Here is that link:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/308447#comment-308447

This baguette usually get a great oven spring and a nice open crumb, but you can see that neither happened here.  Bouabsa baguettes almost always produce a better oven spring than these and are typically chubbier in appearance.

I certainly can’t say I’m sorry that I did this work.  Anything but that.  It helps me to understand the process better, and gives me a chance to spread my baking wings (ugh, not a pretty picture taken literally) a little more.  And hopefully someone reading this on TFL will have benefited from this experiment as well.

alan

A continuation of my journey into the world of cold proofing the shaped, and sometimes shapely, baguettes.  This reporting of the trip again required no passport or Global Entry/Trusted Traveler documentation.  Just a curiosity of what happens when I retard the baguette dough in its final phase prior to its own voyage from couche to oven. My interest in investigating this method is nothing more than an experiment in learning about ways to control the time/temp elements of fermentation, baby steps at a time.

In continuing, I made 4 new batches, one in error.  And the results that I’ve so far concluded is that the final retarded proofing seems to not play much of a role in the time element.  Certainly not as much as I had thought it would.  It also plays little role in the baking equation either, time-wise.  

On the bright side, the dough is cooler than room temp proofing, therefore stiffer and easier to transfer to peel and also to score.  It also helps me reorganize my refrigerator to accommodate the baking sheet that the couche resides on, while rediscovering greenish items tucked in the back that either qualify as very new cheese or very old meat.  (Thank you Oscar Madison for that memory).  And now for this week’s line-up:

Bouabsa olive-rosemary with 21% Kalamata olives and chopped rosemary added at the first letter fold.  Two observations here, neither of which may be legitimate.  I wonder if the rosemary leaves, as small as they are, affected any of the gluten development since they can still act as “micro-razors”, interrupting and perhaps cutting the strands during fermentation and subsequent letter folds.  And secondly, whether the weight of the olives suppressed the oven spring.  From the top down the baguettes have a bit of the look of overproofing, although the cross section of the bread does not.

Gosselin SJSD.  These are just such happy, tasty, lovely beasts.  I dropped the hydration of these from 75% down to 72% a number of months ago, as the dough remained a bit too sticky for my liking.  However, next time around, if I’m still playing with the cold proof, maybe I’ll kick the hydration back up again.

36 Error SJSD.  Okay so it was supposed to be 36 hour, but I made a rookie error along the way, officially disqualifying them as the real deal.  Instead of retarding my autolyse overnight, I added the levain build to the freshly mixed F&W, autolysing at room temp for a mere 30 minutes.  Therefore I changed some critical parameters and turned the 36 hour formula into a ~30 hour Frankenstein.  No issues with the outcome, but it wasn’t what I was shooting for.

36 Hour SJSD.   I decided this time to pay attention to the methodology – why the heck not?, although I have a few variations of my own applied here.  These baguettes are a bit of a bear to get a good score on, but from what else I see on TFL, I think that I get the job done.  In the past I’ve questioned the level of open crumb that TxFarmer achieves, somewhere in the stratosphere, and something that I don’t think I’ll ever approach.  A significant artistic skill to be sure, but too much open crumb seems to be a bit too much, for me anyway.

In summary, between the 36 Hour SJSD and the Gosselin SJSD, I think that I like the latter better.  They both take about the same time to produce, clock-wise, with the Gosselins requiring the heavy lifting at the tail end, and the 36 Hour work load on the day prior to the bake.  A more consistent scoring and, to my palate, a slightly better flavor makes the Gosselin version a bit more my cup of tea.

Of minor note, one of the variations to the original formulation of the SJSD levain has been to use more or all whole grain flour vs. AP flour during the build.  A 50/50 mix of WW and rye.  I don’t use any fancy flours, just Pillsbury Best AP, KA WW and Arrowhead Mills or Bob’s rye, because that is what my local market carries, not by specific choice.  My salt is the standard Diamond Kosher flake salt.

I think that I’ll continue this journey with a few more formulae that I haven’t yet used, so beware, there may be a “take 3” occupying space on TFL down the road...

alan 

No, not a chilly winter, at least not here in Florida where it remains delightful through the winter months.  But rather a chilly twist to my proofing stage.  My kitchen runs warmer than many, and proving my baguettes can be a bit of a coin toss at times.  Anywho, a few bakes ago, when I split my Field Blend #2 dough into a DO boule and two gros baguettes, I decided to retard the shaped baguettes in the refrigerator for the proofing step.  Mr. Forkish suggests baking this dough, albeit as a DO boule, right out of the refrigerator, so who am I to disagree?

Well, I really liked the results out of the oven, but I was also attracted to the idea of the refrigerated control of the proof and also the feel of scoring a chilled baguette.  So two days ago I repeated that cold proof step with a batch of SJSDs and today I decided to let that train keep rolling with a batch of “Baguettes a l'Ancienne with Cold Retardation”, a formula posted here in April 2010 by DonD.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/17415/baguettes-l039ancienne-cold-retardation
Here is how DonD describes his creation:

 My first post in April of last year was about a side by side comparison of two of my favorite baguette formulations by Philippe Gosselin and Anis Bouabsa that David Snyder had previously published here on TFL. It was a tough choice to decide which one was better. The Gosselin baguette had an unequaled sweetness due to the overnight cold autolyse and the Bouabsa baguette had an incredibly complex taste due to the cold retardation. I was thinking why not have the best of both world so I started to experiment with combining the two formulations. After a couple of tries, I have succeeded in making a baguette that has the best attributes of both.

And below is my short pictorial history of cold proofed baguettes.

Field Blend #2 Gros Baguettes (yes these are giants even if they don't seem so)

SJSD

Gosselin Baguettes a l'Ancienne

(and my "spelunking" shot from today's bake)

For anyone ready to take the next step beyond the standard and wonderful baguettes so many of us practice, I suggest DonD’s formula.  Give it a whirl.  It is an IDY formula, but a next step even beyond this is the Gosselin SJSD version from Oct. 2012 by David Snyder (which will be coming up on my roulette wheel of bakes in short order).

alan

This is a revised version of something that I put out on the general forum back in June.  Back before I had created any blog entries of my own.  I had asked Floyd if he could move that entry over to the blogs section, but he indicated that the effort was not trivial, and well, he does have a day job.

So here it is again, now under my own blog, with a few minor tweaks and some additions.  Back in June I was documenting some of the tips and crust photos (Gee, so that's where the blog title comes from.  Who'da thunk it?), but they were displayed as a random selection.  Well, here I have reorganized them into a bit more cohesive groupings, based on baguette type and finally the groups of undocumented bags under the heading of whachamacallits.

It's kinda long, but a good representation of the types of breads that I've been concentrating on for the year and change that I've baking.  And just for the heck of it, at the tail end I threw in a few pics of ciabatta that I baked a year ago.

Bouabsa (back where it all began for me, and still one of my two go-to baguettes):  

 Liquid Levain (Mr. David Snyder's pre SJSD version):

SJSD (my other go-to baguette):

Gosselin Baguettes a l'Ancienne:

SJSD Gosselin:

Poolish Baguette:

36 Hour TXFarmer Baguette:

The Undocumented Whatchamacallits:

Ciabatta and ciabatta "skin art":

When last we left my Field Blend #2 first-time-out-of-the-cannon tome, I mentioned that there were lessons learned – aren’t there always?  And that the next time through I’d be applying the scaling, mixing and shaping with my own two grubby hands, now that my sister in law had just about enough of us and skipped town ;-) .

Last night I decided to not shape a second boule and bake it on the oven’s tile deck as I did in the first iteration.  Instead I had the bright idea, not to mention near obsessive idea, of getting back to my dark little world of baguettes.  I divided the dough into two, and shaped one for the Dutch Oven-bound boule.  The second half I divided, unevenly, into two and pre-shaped them for baguettes.  And so onto a couche and into the fridge they also went for overnight retardation.

As the DO boule was baking I shaped the baguettes and couched them again.  Back they went into the refrigerator to await their own fate and to relax while getting used to being baguette shaped pieces of dough.  Once the boule was finished, the baguettes were scored, steamed my standard way and baked.  and here are the results.

As you can see, I did manage to get a better doming of the boule than the prior effort, and a lot less raw flour on the surface of the boule.  Just rice flour on the banneton, and used no flour on the bench at all when I released the boule from the banneton this morning.  Next time out, whenever that may be, I think that I'll retard the boule seam side up so that I can score them myself.

The “gros baguettes” came out as well as I could have expected.  Except, as I relish a dark bake, these should have remained in the oven for another 2-3 minutes each.  The 270g baguette baked for 22 minutes, the 465g for ~25 minutes.  That’s the post bake weight, so they are pretty heavy for home oven baguettes, hence my addition of the term “gros”.

There’s always room for improvement, but I can’t say that I’m anything but pleased as to these results.  Since one or two are going out the front door destined for friends, and I don’t know which yet, it would certainly be the un-neighborly thing to do by cutting them open to inspect the crumb,  That part of the equation shall remain a temporary mystery.

I took a hard break from my standard baguette life to help my sister in law get her nascent bread skills some training wheels while she was visiting from far away.   I decided to do boule shaping with her, less challenging than the whole baguette pre-shape/shape/score shebang, and selected a bread I’ve never done before, in basically a shape I don’t do.  So it was discovery for both of us, but in different ways.

I’ve dined at Ken Forkish’s Trifecta Tavern in Portland and if I can recall correctly, he serves the Field Blend #2 bread to his guests.  It was delicious and so I took the plunge.  

Using my ~three month old levain culture – meaning that it hadn’t been refreshed for that long and which still has quite a bit of get-up-and-go, we followed FWSY instructions with a caveat or two.  Needing 360g of the 80% levain for the two boules, we only built 400g of levain from the culture and sacrificed a mere 40g of overage to the trash bin vs. how Mr. Forkish builds it in his book.  Count me among the throng of TFLers in deciding to not follow his full levain build amount.

I tried to mostly keep hands off and let my sister in law do most of the heavy lifting, with an ever present eye and words of correction/encouragement over her shoulder.  I was given a banneton proofing basket as a gift a year back, unused and lonely in a dark corner of my closet, until this very episode.  As such, I christened it by rubbing rice flour into the basket and also into a small ceramic bowl.  Not having worked with these before I was concerned with a 78% dough with rye flour not releasing and sticking to the surfaces after proofing.  And so I over-floured the basket and bowl with standard AP flour on top of the rice flour, a mistake which I will attempt to avoid next time around.  I let Sandra use the basket and I put my boule into the bowl for overnight proofing in the refrigerator.

Having only 1 Dutch Oven, the decision was made to bake both at the same time.  Hers in the DO and mine on the ceramic tile baking deck in my oven.  Then the oven was steamed my standard way – both Sylvia’s steaming towel and my baking pan of lava rocks with a near-boiling water pour-over.  

The same initial 30 minutes for the covered DO and steam for the deck boule, the final 15-20 minutes uncovered and steam released.  Below is what this first attempt looked like.  Way too much raw flour on the banneton boule.  What surprised me the most is that my baked-on-the-deck boule did not split on top.  I didn’t score it, as it went into the oven seam side up, but the seam did not open.  Hmm.

After Sandra leaves town later this week, I’ll try the whole thang on my own once more, “second verse same as the first”*.  I think that the second iteration will boast better results, with a bit of learning curve applied as well as my more practiced hands in the mix.  I’m curious as to how these will stack up side by side the next time.  We shall see.

alan

*Herman’s Hermits – “I’m Henry the Eighth”