Time for another gratuitous bread post with mostly picture. Well, these are more than just gratuitous I suppose. This is, after all, a journal for me and a record that I go back to if I want to verify something and try not to repeat mistakes. These beauties are the most delicious and damn near perfect baguettes I’ve made so far. The flavor is delightful and almost nutty. The crust and crumb are in perfect crispy/tender harmony.
Like most of Tartine bread recipes these make use of natural leaven for the fermentation and flavor. I have posted before about how I maintain my rye sourdough starter and make the leaven in more detail here. Baguette recipe also uses a Poolish as well. Poolish is made by mixing equal parts of flour and water with a very tiny amount of instant yeast. This sits for several hours until bubbly.
Shaping baguettes is a bit tricky because you need to handle the dough more than a boule shape for example. Too much handling can deflate the dough instead of maintaining all the flavorful bubbles in there. The Tartine book directions are pretty clear though and I got some decent baguette shapes, a total of 4 from the recipe that fit neatly on my baking stone (2 at a time).
Good bread crust depends on steam that helps develop a thin crackly crust with lots of tiny bubble on the surface. Using the “bake in the Dutch oven” method takes care of that by trapping the steam in the pot. With long shapes like a baguette that is not a possible baking method. To trap some steam in I used a large disposable aluminum baking pan, like the one you use to bake a turkey in. This fit neatly on top of the baguettes covering them and the baking stone for the first 15 minutes of the bake time. The result was very good and simulated steam injected professional ovens well.
I mainly baked those to go with a French bean and pork dish (next post). That’s an excellent combination of course, but these baguettes were so good with some butter and salt. They are by far better than the vast majority of baguettes you can find in town.
They came out great and I like your trick of using the aluminum container to cover them. I usually poor boiling water into a container in the oven after having added the loaves, but it is a bit messy. My next oven will have a steam function 🙂
I would love steam function in my oven. Added to the wish list.