The Fugue

This is a success story. In reality it begins long ago and far away when I began tinkering with bread baking. But it's not the culmination of all bread baking, or even of all my bread baking. It's just good. Everything came together and I will now proceed to tell you how it happened, and how my bread compares to grapestart lady and grill boy (in my perhaps-biased opinion).

It started with a book: The Bread Builders: Hearth Loaves and Masonry Ovens. I picked this book up from my university library a couple of weeks ago with the intention of perhaps building a little masonry oven in my backyard. I'd heard that the bread baked therein is exsquisite and beautiful. This book is amazing. It not only tells you how to make a masonry oven, but it tells you how to bake naturally-leavened (sourdough) bread, and it does an excellent job of both. This is Good Reads.

To make a long story short, I learned from the book that I didn't want to build a masonry oven while renting (I do when I buy/build a home), and that I could get nearly identical results with La Cloche, or an imitation thereof. My wife sells Pampered Chef so we got their 9x13 stoneware casserole dish vaulted lid, but you could do with a terra cotta pot. Welding gloves come in handy too.

The loaf development went like this:

• Thursday morning I took 10g 100% hydration active sourdough start and refreshed it with 30g flour and 30g water.
• Thursday evening I mixed up the dough, let it rest for a few minutes, kneaded it, let it rest for an hour, then put it in the fridge overnight.
• Friday morning I took the dough out, let it warm up for an hour (it's hard to handle with bare hands when it's that cold), then formed it into a baguette shape. I put it on the counter under my plastic "greenhouse" to keep up the humidity and let it rise while I was at school (about 8 hours total).
• When I got home I turned the oven to 450 F, with the "cloche" and tiles inside, and let it preheat for 20 minutes. During this time I slashed the loaf and got it onto the peel (that was an ordeal because I forgot to use parchment paper, but it wasn't the end of the world).
• Baked for 35 minutes. (until my probe thermometer hit 95 C which is a good internal temp at my altitude)

The crumb is very nice, as you can see, which I attribute to not overkneading and using a fairly wet dough (about 73% hydration).

The crust was pretty, but not as dark as I'd hoped for (related to the fact that it took too long for an itsy baguette to bake). I think I need to either turn the oven up higher or preheat longer, or both.

This is the recipe I used:

70g     100% hydration active start
170g    all-purpose flour
115g    water
1/2 tsp salt

Well, that's the recipe I should have used, but I miscalculated the salt and had too much salt. Still good but a bit too salty. Yes, this is a little baguette. It's my experimental baking size.

How does my little baguette compare to grapestart lady and grill boy? My baguette wasn't as thin and long as Nancy's, but her crust was tougher and mine was crispy and chewy and tasty without being a workout. My crumb wasn't as delightfully labyrinthine as grill boy's, but still interesting and of good quality. The taste (aside from too much salt) was almost identical to what I remember of the grapestart baguette, which I consumed only a week ago. My start is home-grown here in Las Cruces a month or two ago, perhaps influenced by bacteria that still lingered in my kitchen from the old Polish start that I killed off, but not from San Francisco in any case. So there you have it, the story of my baguette.