Known as "Goofydawg" for decades, a few years ago, I reinvented myself from the geeky image I used to portray to that of a patrician whose life has been refined from experience. And I realized that I'm at the time of my life where I want to share that experience and hopefully pass on some of the knowledge and wisdom I've gained over the years.
My favorite bread to make is baguettes. I love sandwiches and I especially love to make sandwiches with baguettes. And ever since I started making bread, my goal was to make my own baguettes so I could use them for sandwiches. And of all the different kinds of bread that I make, baguettes are the simplest with respect to the process. But they are also the easiest to completely screw up.
With my earliest attempts, the baguettes had a great shape. They appeared to get great oven spring and from appearance alone, they just looked right. But most of the time, they were pretty dense inside and super-chewy. I’d pick up a loaf and my heart would sink because I could feel the heft. They tasted okay, but damn if I couldn’t make a 6″ sub and not be completely weighed down by the dough.
But now my baguettes are light and airy. They have a great chew, but the dough gives very easily. And with the flour that I use, while the crust is crunchy and crispy, it’s not overly so. This bread is perfect for making sandwiches!
What changed to get me to making much better baguettes? In actuality, not much. I just did less; specifically, I worked the dough far less than I would with a larger loaf like a boule or batard. What I realized is that while forming a good, strong gluten network is important with any bread, with baguettes, there’s an inflection point that defines whether I get a light, airy crumb or I get a dense one. And that point comes a helluva lot sooner than when I’m making larger loaves.
With my larger-format loaves, I’m pretty aggressive with mixing the dough upfront until the dough is completely smooth. Then I do about six stretches and folds over the course of three hours from the initial mix. But with baguettes, I mix to a much courser consistency, rest the dough for a half-hour, then do at most two stretches and folds within the first hour then let it rest from 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
It reminds me of making biscuits. With biscuits you never want to overwork your dough. You mix only until all the ingredients are just incorporated and the butter or shortening is reasonably distributed throughout the dough. Then you roll it out and cut the biscuits. It’s a similar thing with making baguettes. Less is definitely more!
I wish I could explain where that inflection point is, but it’s something I feel. What I can share is that once I finish the second stretch and fold, if I can pull on the dough mass and the whole thing wants to come up, I know I’ve hit that point where the dough’s strong enough. And then I leave it alone!
Leaving the dough alone was a very difficult thing for me to learn. In fact, even with my larger-format loaves, I’ve learned that resting is just as important as manipulating the dough. And it’s been especially tough for a naturally impatient person as myself. As I used to say, “If patience was a virtue, then I’d be a slut.”
…eat grocery store bread any longer, unless there isn’t an alternative. And if there isn’t one, I will be extremely picky of what I buy. Luckily for me though, I bake practically every day, so the likelihood of me having to buy a loaf of bread is pretty low.
I realize that this might seem obvious considering this blog is now almost entirely about my bread-making journey and I think it’s clear that I bake – a lot! But if baking bread was merely an occasional affair, I’d certainly be buying bread from the grocery and wouldn’t feel compelled to write an article like this. But yeah… I’m kind of done with store-bought bread.
What prompted me to write this was last night’s dinner which was graciously prepared by a good friend to help my family out while I recover from surgery. She made an absolutely wonderful vegetable frittata, a fresh green salad, watermelon, and brownies for dessert. And she included a small loaf of heat and serve sourdough. My family really enjoyed the meal. But not one of us could eat the bread beyond a single bite!
I took a bite of it and put my piece down. But I didn’t say anything to the rest of the family because I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. But then my wife asked my son, “Do you want my bread? I can’t eat it. I like Dad’s bread more.”
Then she turned to me and asked, “What do you think of it?” I replied, “I can’t eat it.” My wife laughed and said, “We’ve gotten really spoiled with Daddy’s bread.” We all had a bit of a laugh at that remark, but it’s true. To all of us, store-bought bread’s taste and texture simply pale in comparison to what I can produce at home. But that’s not the only thing…
It’s well-known that commercial bread and bread products have additives. But did you ever consider what the nature of these are? Honestly, I was blissfully ignorant of these for years. But once I started successfully making my own bread and doing a lot of research on home versus commercial baking, I was shocked at some of the things I discovered.
Did you know that lots of bread labeled “sourdough” isn’t made from an actual sourdough starter? They inject acetic acid in the dough to give it its sour taste! Furthermore, manufacturers enrich bread with all sorts of chemicals to help the dough be fluffier or give it longer shelf life or give it a better color. And especially in the US, commercial bread makers add chemicals that have been linked to cancer and even banned in other countries. Click the link I provided above. It’s eye-opening.
The FDA argues that the parts-per-million amount of these chemicals is so small as to be negligible. But what does that mean? Is that negligible against an average response? What about those people whose systems will react at just the slightest amount?
That said, I’m not going to eschew commercial bread entirely. If it’s the only thing available, I’ll eat a bit of it, though I will limit my intake going forward. But if I have access to artisan bread, either made by me or someone else, I’ll choose the artisan alternative.
I’m actually pretty amazed at how mobile I am just three days after full hip replacement surgery. And I have to admit that my relative comfort level has quite a bit to do with the pain meds I’m on. But irrespective, since I’m capable of moving around and to avoid getting bored, I decided to bake baguettes!
I just pulled those baguettes out of the oven a few minutes ago! You’ll notice the ears on one loaf and just nice openings on the others. I was experimenting with my scoring and wanted to see what a shallow score would produce. I’ll stick with the deeper score. 🙂
Now normally when I bake baguettes, I make a poolish the night before I bake. But I was pretty exhausted last night, so I decided to make a straight dough this morning. Here’s my recipe:
Flour
Water
Salt
Yeast
500 grams
365 grams (85º-90º F)
12 grams
7 grams
This will produce a 73% hydration dough
Measure out your flour into a large mixing bowl.
Add the water and mix until no dry ingredients are present and you form a shaggy dough.
Let the dough rest for 30 minutes (autolyse)
Sprinkle the salt and yeast evenly over the surface of the dough.
Thoroughly mix the salt and yeast into the dough.
Dump the dough onto an unfloured surface
Knead the dough until it just starts getting smooth (about 5-8 minutes). Do NOT overwork it! The moment you start feeling tension in the dough (it feels like you’re fighting it), stop kneading.
Transfer the dough back to your mixing bowl and let it rest for 30 minutes.
Now do a stretch a fold and form the dough into a ball, then turn it over onto the folds.
Allow the dough to rise from 1-2 hours. Check after an hour – you want the dough to have expanded at least 50%. You should see some bubbles formed on top and the surface should be nicely domed. At about 50% rise, you have room for proofing/final rise which I found is critical with baguettes.
If you don’t see much activity, which typically happens on cooler days, do one more gentle stretch and fold and let the dough rise for an hour. But check it at a half hour because sometimes all the little beasties needed was a nudge. 🙂 Again, you want to see some bubbles, but not a preponderance of them.
Gently remove the risen dough from the bowl onto an unfloured surface.
Portion out the dough into four equal pieces. By weight, the pieces should weigh about 213-215 grams apiece. Alternatively, you can portion out into three for a little beefier baguettes (I do this when I’m making baguettes for sandwiches).
Lightly sprinkle the tops of the portioned dough with flour, then pre-shape each into a nice, tight ball.
Flip the balls over on their folds, sprinkle a little more flour on top, then cover with a cloth and bench rest for 15 minutes.
Shape the balls into baguettes. Here’s a simple, yet effective shaping technique from Markus Farbinger. But just take note: When you fold the dough, you want to make sure you’re creating good tension on the skin without tearing it! You don’t want to be lackadaisical with the folding because you won’t get any spring.
If you have a couche, transfer the shaped loaves to the couch (or you can use a well-floured towel) and let them proof for an hour. This is why you don’t want to over-ferment in the bulk fermentation stage.
Preheat your oven to 480 degrees.
Once proofed, transfer the loaves to your peel, score with nice longitudinal cuts, then bake for 15 minutes. Provide steam for the first 15 minutes, then remove the steaming container. Then turn your oven down to 450 for 10 minutes.
You might be wondering why I’m using 7 grams of yeast. You can definitely use less, but it lengthens the timeline. I came up with this recipe specifically because I wanted to produce the bread relatively quickly with limited manipulation because I was literally three days out of total hip replacement surgery. But you know what? I like this process because it produces great results!
What About Using a Poolish?
You can absolutely use a poolish, and that’s my normal method of making baguettes. Typically I use 25% of my total flour for the flour I use for a poolish, and I make the poolish at 100% hydration. I do this the night before I bake and give it about 12-16 hours to ferment. At 12 hours, it will not be sour, but at 14-16 hours, it will get nicely sour, so if you vary the times of the poolish, you can make different flavored baguettes.
If you do use a poolish, you have the option of bumping up the fermentation activity with some yeast, or just let the poolish be the only leavening agent. If you do decide to use a bit of yeast, use no more than 2 grams of yeast because you have a lot of active microbes already in your dough, and you just want to give it a little kick.
Yet Another Word on Flour
If you read this blog with any regularity, I’m pretty obsessed with flour. Now even though I occasionally make my baguettes with white flour, you all know that my flour of choice is a 75-25 blend of high-extraction flour and white whole wheat flour (the second picture); and specifically, flours produced with the Unifine milling process. I prefer the darker crust it produces (the picture at the top) but more importantly, the nutrition those flours provide.
If you venture into high-extraction flour (Type 85 and above), do not expect to get the kind of open crumb you get with white flour. It just ain’t gonna happen. The particulates in high-extraction and whole wheat flour cut the gluten strands. And if you think working the dough to build more structure will help, it won’t. The strands you do create will be so tight, you won’t get any holes!
This is why I advocate for doing a shorter bulk and a bit longer final proof. This allows the dough to really relax so when you place the loaves in the oven, the final activity before the microbes die will allow for better gas pocket formation.
Celiac disease is thought to affect roughly one percent of the population. The good news: it can be treated by quitting gluten. The bad news: many celiac patients haven’t been diagnosed. The weird news: millions of people without celiac disease have quit gluten – which may be a big mistake.
For years, a very good friend of mine has claimed to have celiac disease. He went to a doctor but wasn’t actually diagnosed to have it, though the doctor did say that he could be one of those folks that has a non-celiac sensitivity to gluten. But he has so thoroughly convinced himself that he has this sensitivity that he has foregone many gluten products like pasta. Frankly, I think his sensitivity is more psychosomatic than anything else. I know that sounds a little insensitive of me, But here’s the rub: He can eat as much of the bread I bake as he wants with no side effects.
What’s actually funny is that even though he gobbles up my bread, he catches himself and says, I really should go easy on this stuff as if he’s telling himself he has this allergy or sensitivity; a belief that is bolstered by all the marketing around “gluten-free” products. It has gotten so bad that some bottled water companies advertise that their water is gluten-free. WTF? The gluten-free craze has really gotten out of hand.
Though I’m no scientist, maybe people’s recent sensitivity to bread has more to do with all the shit that’s put into mass-produced bread, like sugar and vitamins and preservatives. Maybe people’s bodies have absorbed the limit of what they can take and their systems are reacting.
I shared this thinking with my friend and also added that the bread I bake as well as that of other artisan bread makers has just four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and a leavening agent. There are no enrichment materials, no preservatives. The bread we make is made the way bread was originally made for literally thousands of years.
In the excellent documentary series on Netflix called “Cooked,” author of the book on which the documentary is based and star of the show Michael Pollan delves into this subject of how mass-produced bread has taken us away from the traditional healthy aspects of bread. The specific episode is called, “Air.” He too posits that perhaps most people who claim to have a gluten sensitivity may not be sensitive to gluten at all, but all the other stuff that’s present in mass-produced bread, suggesting that perhaps people with a gluten sensitivity try out traditional bread and see how they react.
Having said all that, I don’t want to discount the fact that there are people who have a real intolerance to gluten. But the only way to really know is if you are diagnosed by a doctor with having celiac disease. With respect to my friend, I pointedly asked him, “Did your doctor specifically diagnose you with celiac disease?” He said no, to which I replied that I while I didn’t want to discount his possible sensitivity to bread that it’s telling that he doesn’t react to bread made in the traditional way.
Gluten has really gotten a bad rap. Even I was kind of falling for this gluten-is-bad craze. But that kind of went out the window once I started baking. And I also started becoming a lot more aware and sensitive to the marketing behind the anti-gluten movement. Beware of companies using the term “gluen-free” with products that could never have it in the first place, like… water. Bear in mind that they’re using that phrase to convey that their products are somehow superior because they’re gluten free.
Unfortunately, this kind of marketing has created a paranoia around gluten. Obviously, you’ll have to decide for yourself what direction you take with respect to gluten. For me, after having done a bit of research, I’m not falling for it any longer. And no… I ain’t no conspiracy theorist…
Coming to you live from my hospital bed… I just had a full hip replacement surgery yesterday and the reality is that I will probably be out of commission for the next week to ten days recuperating from the surgery. So I most likely will be in bed. But despite that, I really just want to bake bread.It’s my Zen-thing. It puts me in an emotional and psychological place where everything is in balance and in perfect harmony.
For me, the act of baking bread is almost cathartic. Pent-up stress, anxiety, work-related issues – they’re suddenly released when I start working a dough. From the time I start weighing out ingredients to producing the finished product, I’m in the zone.
And in a very large way, baking is healing for me. I could be in the crappiest of moods when I start making bread, but by the time I’m finished my “baditude” is gone.
There are so many other things I could point out, but irrespective of them, I just want to heal up and get back to baking as soon as I can!
Now that I’m more experienced at bread baking, you could say that being a bit of a Captain Obvious. But when I first started baking it wasn’t at all. I thought I’d just merrily use any old AP or bread flour and that would be that. And it was fine for the first few times. The loaves I made were tasty, if not necessarily aesthetically pleasing to look at; a little misshapen, or risen so much in the Dutch oven that it was a perfect imprint of the inside of the pot, or a replica of a flying saucer.
But as my initial interest starting transforming into the obsession it is now, I started looking into different techniques and ingredients that would improve the quality of the bread I baked, and one of those things was flour.
Like many, I jumped on the King Arthur bread flour bandwagon. It seemed that most home bakers used it and quite frankly, it’s great flour. And for the first couple of months I was baking, I used either that or the KA Special Patent flour which creates a real smooth, fluffy texture as it is geared towards buns and pastries.
But as I’ve shared a few times in previous posts, because of health reasons, I had to seriously reconsider not just the visual and taste quality of my bread but also its nutritional value and quality. So I started to make 100% whole wheat loaves. They looked pretty good, but ugh! They felt a little grainy and also tended to be a little dense as whole grain bread can be.
This led me on a quest for flour that I could work like regular bread flour but had the nutritional value of whole wheat. And that brought me to the flour that I use now and that I’m absolutely crazy about: The Unifine White Whole Wheat and Ultra-Unifine Bread Flour. Used in a 25-75 ratio, I get the feel of working with a bread flour but the nutritional benefits of a whole wheat flour as the bread flour is a high-extraction flour.
But more importantly, the taste of the bread that this combination produces is unlike any bread I’ve ever had. No matter if I create a sourdough or straight dough, I’m always rewarded with a slightly sweet aftertaste and an absolutely wonderful, chewy texture. The Unifine milling process smooths out the particulates in the flour so you don’t get that graininess that you normally feel with whole grain bread. But from a taste perspective, you know you’re eating whole wheat – or at least close to it.
So this is now my master flour despite having claimed that in another post for a completely different combination. And for me, having discovered this combination completely changes the game for me because I can focus all my baking efforts and skill development around working mainly with this flour. It just removes some of the guesswork and I can create a more consistent process.
As some might know, I technically don’t make traditional sourdough in that I don’t maintain a starter culture to inoculate my dough. There are a number of reasons for this which I won’t go into here, but in lieu of a starter culture, I do use a poolish I create the day before I bake, which means I make practically every evening.
I know what you’re thinking. I could just maintain a starter and use the discard every day. But I have to be honest. I don’t want to invest the minimum five days in creating the culture – at least not right now. I’d rather be baking. Plus, as I greatly admire Nancy Silverton who started La Brea Bakery in LA, when I’m ready to do a sourdough starter, really want to try her grape sourdough. It’s pretty amazing. But I digress…
So as I mentioned, I use a poolish as a starter for my breads. A poolish is made from a 50-50 mixture of flour and water, and literally a pinch of yeast (I measure out 0.4 gram). I make mine at about 6-7 PM in the evening, then let it sit in my fermentation bucket on my counter overnight. Then at about 9-10 AM the next day, I prepare the final dough.
Now here’s where I scratch my head. Technically, a poolish is not a levain. A levain has no commercial yeast. And conventionally, a levain equates to a sour taste. This is because the airborne yeasts and lactic acid bacteria work in concert to consume the sugars in the flour and create that sour flavor. But my poolish is sour.
I let my poolish develop around 14 hours. And in that time, the natural yeasts and bacteria have time to activate and make a contribution to the flavor and gluten development in the starter. And it seems that at that point, the predominant microorganisms that act on the dough are the natural ones, not the commercial yeast. But of course, unless I actually do a chemical test, I can’t be absolutely certain.
But if my assertion is true, is my pre-ferment starter a levain at that point? Frankly, it’s not really important at all, but I just like to understand things so it remains a bit of a head-scratcher for me.
And as Nancy Silverton, founder of La Brea Bakery in LA said, “For me when I think of any food product, the most important test is the result, right? And how you got there is sort of incidental…”
When I first heard her say that, it gave me a lot of encouragement because I’ve lately had this feeling that even though I’ve been absolutely methodical and meticulous with my technique, I’ve been a bit unconventional. But the results have been great for the most part and it’s great to hear one of the greats in bread making provide some validation. So I guess I can keep scratching my head about this, but at least I know that the results are what matter.
Flat bread… Ugh! You’d think that I’d have learned my lesson about baking in a hot kitchen. Times are MUCH shorter! But NOOOOOOOOOO! I let my dough rise for too long. The hell of it is that it tastes wonderful, but it’s UGLY. It’s like in high school when your friend is setting you up on a blind date and tells you, “She has a GREAT personality!”
My wife cut a slice and told me that it tasted incredible. I was expecting that because I really let my poolish develop for almost 30 hours. I just wanted to have that great taste with a great look! The picture above doesn’t really show just how flat those loaves are. But they’re pretty flat. And mind you, I’m not really pissed off; I’m more amused than anything else, mixed in with a bit of disappointment.
Pre-shaping, the dough was great. But it was hot, and frankly, I probably should’ve only proofed for about 15-20 minutes tops. But I let it go for a full hour and didn’t bother to check. By the time I got to the loaves, they had collapsed. Ugh! Pissed me off, but in a humorous way.
Failure is part of learning. They all can’t be perfect every time. I just have to be more vigilant next time!
I have to admit that I was originally compelled to make bread when I saw a recipe entitled, “Easy Dutch Oven No Knead Bread.” And with that recipe, all you did was mix the ingredients together and let the dough sit overnight. Other than forming the dough into a ball the next day, you don’t touch it. I made it and it’s easy and no fuss. But then after making it a couple of times, I started looking at other no-knead bread recipes and each one of them had some sort of manipulation involved; specifically, stretching and folding. So I set out to understand why these recipes involved folding and not just leaving the dough alone.
And in my research, which also involved making bread from the recipes I encountered, I came to realize that even though the mix-together-and-let-sit-for-24-hours method works because it gives the yeast time to convert the proteins into gluten, it can have inconsistent results. The reason why is that if the dough wasn’t sufficiently mixed with all the yeast distributed evenly through the dough, the rise will be uneven. On the other hand, folding the dough ensures that not only is the dough mixed well just in case I missed some, it also ensures that the yeast gets distributed consistently through the dough.
Now technically, stretch and fold, coil fold, slap and fold and other dough folding techniques aren’t kneading. But they are methods to physically work the dough, albeit a gentler approach than kneading or using a machine which is the most intense way of developing gluten. And no matter how you work it, it’s going to help the yeast evenly distribute throughout the dough and help build up the gluten network.
So given all that, while no-knead can mean fire and forget, to develop a good loaf, you need to work it somehow.
A friend of mine asked me why I write the blogs that I write. To answer that, I have to go into a little bit of a back story. I already have a fairly popular blog called GuitarGear.org that I started over 13 years ago. It’s still going strong, but I really don’t contribute to it that much any longer. Though for several years, it was one of the more popular guitar-gear-related sites and I was going lots of reviews. Then there’s the recent conversion of this site from a vanity free-for-all blog to one that’s focused almost entirely on bread making. In both cases, I’ve used the blogs to record things I would learn and document processes. But in the case of this blog, it’s a little bit more than that.
You see, I’m pushing 60. Truth be told, I now have more years behind me than I have left. It’s life and I’ve lived a great life. But especially in the last few years I’ve come to notice something: I’m losing my memory. I have to write down practically everything nowadays lest I forget something. I have to be in regular contact with people for me to remember their names when I see them – unless they’re close family or friends where their visage and spirit are etched in my brain. And as you can probably tell since I’m writing about it, I know that it’s happening. I’m completely aware that my memory is eroding.
Does it bug me? Not nearly as much as you might think. The reason is that I’m still able to retain memories of things that are important to me, such as details in my professional life and people and places that have been part of my life, shaping who I am as a person. What I’ve started losing is my memory of the mundane.
It’s almost as if my brain knows I’m starting to butt up against my memory capacity, so it says, Hmm… not really too impactful… We’ll keep it there for a few days, then just let it go or replace it with another mundane memory. It’s as if my brain created what is known in software engineering as a FIFO buffer, which stands for first-in-first-out. It’s a construct of limited size where the oldest thing placed in the space is always the first thing to go.
Frankly, I find this rather amusing – at least for now. But in anticipation of my memory getting worse – and it will get worse – I’m writing everything down that I’m learning about bread making, and doing it in a way where I’m sharing or teaching because I found that when I do things like that, I remember them better.
Maybe I shouldn’t take my worsening condition so blithely. But I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it, other than doing my best to de-clutter my life, which has actually helped slow the effects a lot. But even all that just slows it down and doesn’t eliminate it. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll get to the point where I don’t remember much at all, but here’s what I do know:
I’ve lived an amazing life.
I’ve had the privilege to travel to distant places, literally halfway around the world
I’ve been married for almost 30 years to the same woman and we have had eight wonderful children together.
I have a cadre of close friends whom I have been able to lean on in times of need or provide support.
I’ve had a long and successful career in technology
I’ve had the freedom in my life to pick up hobbies like bread making
I have my Faith and a community that helps nourish my spiritual needs
In other words, I’m completely grateful for what I have RIGHT NOW. I know that my life could end at any time. I’m not going to spend my days worrying over things that I can’t control. So if I’m losing my memory, I’m losing my memory. I’m not going to lay down in a fetal position and give up. I may not have as many days in front of me as I have left behind, but I’m doing to do the best I can with the days I have left – no matter if I can remember them or not. 🙂
The Dawg House! 