Baguettes and 40% whole wheat

After a business trip to Barcelona, which exposed me to baguettes and their crusty potential, I started experimenting with the long and thin dough shape. Results were good, but they became great recently when I decided to cut down on the amount of whole wheat in the dough (I'd been doing more than half whole wheat flour, with AP taking up the rest).

So, using Peter Reinhart's sourdough method as outlined in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, I used approximately 8.25 oz of whole wheat flour and 12 oz of AP flour (or around 40% and 60% of flour weight, respectively, which excludes the completely unbleached all purpose flour starter).

It's very good bread. Retarding the shaped baguettes overnight allowed for an even better flavor and texture.

Notes for next time: build up more gluten, maintain hotter oven for longer.

Catch up

I'm sure almost no one has passed by this blog, but as it was initially intended as a means for me to document and take notes on my development as a sourdough baker, I am ashamed at the lack of updates here. Since the beginning of all of this, I haven't taken a break of more than one week from working with the New Zealand culture I woke up way back in June 2009. Looking over these previous entries, I laugh at how deflated and strange my old boules looked. I am not going to be humble about it; I've gotten pretty good with baking sourdoughs, thanks, in short, to perseverance in the pursuit of good bread without commercial yeast.

My latest sourdough experiment was a potato rosemary recipe that used a commercial yeast starter, but I used my still developing skills to adapt the recipe for my starter, and it came out great. I used blue potatoes (and the cooking water) in an attempt to make it a noticeable shade of blue, but it turned out rather normal, ruining the marketing brainstorm session I had while mashing the potatoes up before adding to the dough.

ALSO, a breakthrough for me has been using my dutch oven to bake the breads. I preheat it along with the oven and drop the dough into it, close the lid, and then after about 20 minutes insert my probe thermometer and remove the lid. Otherwise, I just follow the same procedures as always, and the breads have way more spring and look amazing!

A lot of my breads have been at least photographically documented, but instead of trying to find as many different loaves as I can in all of my photos, here is a photo of the sourdough I think came out the best of recent baking sessions. I added some crushed garlic I sauteed briefly in olive oil, my favorite variation so far for sourdough.