As planned, I spent Sunday making bread. I used the recipe for "Acme's Rustic Baugettes." I'm actually a bit puzzled by the name because they certainly are shaped in the standard way. Perhaps "Rustic" refers to the fact that they make less use of commercial yeast -- the majority of baugettes in France are currently made in a fairly "dull" manner.
The recipe makes use of two pre-ferments prepared the day before. First off is about a cup of "leftover dough" which in this case is made the day before (in a Bakery you just literally use something leftover). The second is a "poolish" which is a very battery dough left for about 12 hours.
The original recipe called for All Purpose flour, but I used bread flour. It also had a rather silly sub-dividing of yeasted water between the dough and poolish. I instead just use a small amount of dough as the yeast injection for the poolish. Only a total of 1/2 tsp of yeast is used for 4 baugettes. This is probably about 1/4 of the amount you would normally see in a normal cookbook. Fermentation and rise times were longer as a result, but not a huge amount.
I did an OK job at forming the baugettes, but a lousy job of transfering them to the baking stone. This resulted in only one of the four being straight. They tasted great, however, and the interior came out just about how I like to see it.
I think I might start a multi-day sourdough project for baking this weekend.
Posted by dowdy at September 29, 2003 10:49 AM