Mike Nolan
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Yeah, we had rain yesterday, I'm sure the grass and plants appreciated it. Today it is sunny but not very warm, and frost warnings are out for tonight again. Then it is supposed to warm up.
Today I'm doing boeuf bourguignon with braised onions, sauteed mushrooms and spaetzle, a cherry pie and chocolate chip challah.
I've already baked a cherry pie and I have chocolate chip challah dough rising.
Today's bake was a D+ for appearance and an A- for taste.
The dough was even harder to slash than the previous batch, I tried a slightly higher hydration level, let the bulk proof run an additional hour and tried spraying the dough with water before final proof.
I think the 3rd change was the biggest problem, it seemed to have the opposite effect of what I wanted, making the dough easier to slash. The dough was quite sticky and loose at division, a couple of stretch-and-folds and a light dusting of flour on the work surface seemed to help both issues for shaping. The baguettes still flattened out a bit during final rise, but the oven spring nearly made up for it. They stuck down to the parchment, but it peeled off OK.
This batch was tastier than the previous batch, my wife thinks it was lighter and a bit less chewy. I'm attributing that mainly to the longer bulk rise.
I'll need at least one more test batch, I think.
Today I'm making the 2nd test set of baguettes. I'm going to give this one a slightly longer bulk rise, its a few degrees colder in the kitchen today.
We've got frost warnings the next 3 nights. In years past we often had our tomatoes in the ground around Mother's Day, but in the past few years we've had several cold snaps after the 15th of May, so I'm waiting a while. The seeds we started inside aren't big enough to be transplanted yet, anyway.
We had leftover lasagna.
Interesting articles. The whole wheat honey challah is one I may try, I found it interesting that it used the egg yolk instead of the egg white for the wash.
Aaron, can we find a time to test your zoom account?
Not sure what happened, the topic was in the 'pending' queue, but I released it.
Baguettes are not the easiest bread to make, quite a few bread sites have post after post from people seeking the key.
We wound up having peanut butter on baguettes for supper.
Hooch is largely the alcohol produced by the yeast, which could stunt or kill the yeast if there was enough of it.
If a starter is left idle for a long time (lost at the back of the fridge), it can reach a point where the yeast and the alcohol reach an equilibrium.
I give today's test bake a B-, the dough got a bit of a skin on it during the final rise and that made it hard to slash cleanly. I'll have to work on that. The crumb wasn't quite as open as I had hoped, either, I think it deflated a bit as I was transferring it from the couche to the baking sheet. I don't have a flip board, maybe I'll try to make one. Or I may try to do the final rise on the baking sheet rather than in a couche.
But it still tastes pretty good and making what Chad Robertson calls a young leaven or immature starter by adding a very small amount of my rye starter (around 5%) to flour and water at 100% hydration and letting it double overnight at room temperature, then using that plus a small amount of instant dry yeast produced a bread that rose fairly well, but with just a hint of an acid taste.
There's always a question of how long to bake a baguette. As bakers, we tend to like the ones that have a lot of browning on them, but bakeries often report that one that are just mildly browned sell faster.
I'm planning to do at least one more test bake before I break into the T65 flour.
Oh, I could THINK of doing it, but I'd fail miserably in execution, because I'm just not 'artistic'.
I've got 3 baguettes in final proof in my couche, turning them out onto the baking pan will be next, then I'll slash two of them and cut the third for epis de bles. I'm doing things a bit differently, so it's like going back to school on baguettes. This is my (first) practice batch using KAF bread flour, the recipe is a bit higher hydration than I'm used to.
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