Acme's Rustic Baguette 20100925-20100926

I thought it would be great to make Acme's Rustic Baguette (Artisan Baking by Maggie Glezer), which starts with a scrape dough and a poolish. For this I used NYB Natural Bread Flour. I started mid-afternoon, which caused the suggested pre-fermenting times to be extended. Although the recipe called for instant yeast, a nod by Maggie's book for those who have trouble getting fresh yeast, I used the compressed fresh yeast I got from NYBakers. I used notes from my conversation with Stan indicating that fresh yeast is equal to 40% instant yeast. For all of the recipes, I used NYB's Sel Gris de Guerande salt.

The next day I resumed making the Rustic Baguette using the pre-ferments from the day before. As with all bread recipes, I used a scale for metric weight measurement. Following the directions I mixed the dough, adding the pre-ferments, allowed for the autolyse, and then did the final mix. The recipe indicated that the dough, when fully kneaded, should be soft and smooth and dry to the touch with a very smooth gluten window, adding extra water as needed. However, the dough was very sticky and only tore when I attempted to make a gluten window. I ended up adding another 90 grams of flour to make it dry to the touch. Considering I started with only 340 grams, that was a lot of added flour.

After adding the flour to make the dough dry to the touch, I let it rise, turning it every 20 minutes for the first hour, then let it complete the rise for a total of 3 hours. After the dough had tripled, I pre-formed the bread according per the directions and tightly covered it in plastic wrap. The next instructions were to make the final loaf forms. What I noticed the most was the very smooth feel of the bread and how remarkably light it felt. The dough felt more like holding whipped cream instead of a typical (to me) ball of dough.

Rising

Tripled

Benching the Dough

Tightly wrapped in plastic wrap to rise

After the rise, cutting the dough for baguettes

I don't have a couche, this will have to do

I later baked the bread, which turned out to be tasty, but a much smaller crumb then I expected. Stan suggested that this could be due to me adding so much flour. Oops. Although good, the baguette wasn't remarkable. This, I believe, is because I didn't allow the dough to be more slack, which would have provided a larger crumb. I think I can do better next time. Practice, practice, practice ...