I hope you had a great Christmas. Christmas here – when it comes to the food- has been all about green lush salads, light seafood, glazed ham and the traditional queugneux of North and North Eastern France (ou cougnoux in Belgium) with think hot chocolate on Christmas morning (recipes to come ahead of next Christmas)!
This post is about the journey of trials and errors in getting to make sourdough baguettes. Now, they are all you expect from a baguette: crusty, tasty, bubbly. They keep well if not eaten on day one or two and can then be toasted for breakfast. I even got an order of baguettes for Christmas!
If you want to see the recipe directly, go HERE.
A sticky dough, but how wet?
My first trials was to try making sourdough baguettes out of the same dough as bread dough. While the baguette taste all right, it does not have any of the quality of the real baguette and its biggest failure is the lack of those big bubbles that make for a lighter bread. Having played a few times with very wet dough (when you put the same weight of flour and water), I knew that those dough were lighter and allowed for much bigger bubbles. The drawback, those breads cannot held their weight and tend to be rather flat.
So, in a game of trials and error, I did end up finding the suitable proportions. Looking at a few recipes after that, it is similar to those. I could have saved myself a fair bit of trialing.
In need of flexibility in the dough
Next, I was not getting a very flexible dough (yes, we – and some neighbours- ate a number of trial breads!). As a consequence, the shaping was a little difficult. In a book that I bought nine years ago called “The bread bible” by Rose Levy Beranbaum, the author has a recipe for baguettes, but for the classic french baguette. That recipe has a number of prefermented doughs. Prefermented dough have the benefits to add flavour to the bread and as I found by trialing make the dough a lot more flexible.
The two technics that I now use:
- I mix the water and flour from the main part of the recipe at the same time I feed the starter, that is 24 hours before actually making the bread. I cover it and place it in the fridge. It takes 3 minutes max.
- When I make the dough, I use my mixer. I am sure to obtain the right consistency and it is rather quick (7 minutes and voila!).
The last rising is critical
The above practices have not prevented me ending up with some pretty poor breads because I sped up the last rising, or rather did not let it happen properly. Lesson learnt, the last rising is critical for the baguette.
A camping holidays experience
And I could not let you go without speaking of my bread test trials while camping…
At the end of the school break, we joined a few families for a week camping along the NSW coastline. I had taken a little of my sourdough starter to experiment cooking bread while camping. Our family does the camping thing very lightly, we have none of the camping bulky equipment, so our camp remains basic. The camp ground was walk access only, which is great!! In other words, I had no camp oven (even so, it was total fire ban!).
I realised I had nothing to measure proportions to make the bread. In the end, I made a big batch of bread dough and got the children to make little bread rolls, I kept enough for a large bread. Until then, all went as it should. The only option for the baking was the large cooking pots with lids. I placed the rolls on baking baker, some water at the bottom bellow the baking paper. The rolls were basically cooked by steaming. Cooking time is really quick that way. The result was a little strange: there was no crust! The taste was fine, the inside as well, it was just missing its natural aesthetic. Next morning I had avo on toast and it was delicious!
