Just beautiful. I’m stuck with boule
until I get new bannetons
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These are my ‘bannetons’, cheap fake wicker baskets bought at a restaurant supply house for about $2/ea
They were a touch too wide so I crushed some tinfoil into the corners to narrow them slightly. Line w tea towels dusted liberally w rice flour. Proof in fridge overnight in proofing bag 15-16 hours.
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I got this
doing a cold proof in the fridge right now. Will be ready for baking later tonight, and I will post initial results (I may wait until tomorrow morning to cut into it).
This KA recipe is not that different, process-wise, from the link I had posted from a “private” blog. The KA does use bread flour (and, based on a comment awhile ago from @honkman, I thought I’d give a recipe w/ bread flour a try). I did alter the percentage of wheat flour (and added some rye, since I like the flavor).
Even though it’s 80% hydration, this dough was WAY easier to work w/! (not surprisingly) Hope it gets good oven spring. Fingers crossed.
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Wish I could find a restaurant supply shop
Ventura? Canoga Park?
haven’t been able to find one… either one is fine. haaaalp. i’m ready to start carving bannetons out of wood from a tree the winds knocked down lol
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Okay, this looks relatively promising:
I screwed up the baking b/c I hadn’t realized that I had pushed “Convection Bake” until I put the dough in. Convection bake on my oven automatically lowers the temp 40-50 deg relative to regular Bake. So I had a 450 deg dutch oven, rather than 490. I turned it up to 490 deg on regular bake for about 15 mins after putting in the dough and then turned it back down to 450 deg. I left the lid on 5 mins longer (25 instead of 20 mins). Not sure if any of that made a difference.
I normally do not get a bake this dark from a 45 min total bake time, and I’m taking that as a good sign.
My scoring still could use some work, but at least much of the seams burst open! 
Lots of air bubbles all around the surface.
Shaping the dough never made much sense to me b/c my dough rarely held a shape! This dough held its shape, so I will be more careful about how I shape in the future.
Hope the crumb is open…
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I do love them bien cuit! Great looking boule
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I had to look that up! 
Update:
Just cut into it.
The crumb is good but not amazeballs. There’s def more elasticity, chew here. It’s still quite moist, even 12 hrs later. Does not quite have the depth of flavor of the Forkish country blonde.
The darker parts of the crust are absolutely wonderful! Flavorful (a bit of nuttiness).
I actually measured (as in, w/ a tape measure) the height of the dough before (1.5 inches) and after (2.25 in) bulk fermentation. I basically stopped the fermentation at the lowest recommended point. Given that this dough could’ve easily gone more than 12 hrs on the counter, I think I will let the bulk ferment go on longer (maybe 2.5 inches). I can actually do an overnight ferment w/ this, I think (the dough would overproof w/ an overnight ferment w/ previous recipes).
I’m excited to try again!
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Looks great but I’ve never seen a recipe expressed in only % like that. Do you weigh the total flour and base the rest as %s of that?
Exactly. Those are called ‘baker’s percentages’ and they work just as you described. The total weight of the flour = 100%, and everything else is relative to that. It allows for the easy scaling up/down for any number of loaves. MOST ‘full size’ boules and batards are usually somewhere around 450-500g flour as the base, so that SHOULD give you some idea of where to start.
It’s often easier to work with a slightly larger quantity (say, two loaves worth, rather than one) because the average kitchen scale isn’t really accurate down to the gram level, and if you’re doing things like 2% salt, it’s actually easier and more accurate to weigh out 15-20g of salt, than 7-10.
If you frequently do smaller quantities, use google and convert your grams to tsps or tbsps. For salt, it’s important to keep the type right. i.e. 5 g of table salt is much less in volume than 5 g of Morton kosher salt, which is less than 5 g of Diamond Crystal kosher salt. The finer the salt, the less volume per gram, obv.
also very handy when measuring instant or active dry yeast, which will frequently be only in the 1-2% range. volume measurments are often more accurate for that, unless you have a jewelry scale that’s accurate down to .1 g or something.
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Professional bakers always write recipes as percentages.
Never ruin a perfectly good recipe by converting weights (precise) to volume (unavoidably variable).
I bought a gram scale to portion bulk supplements so I used it for baking until I realized that our regular kitchen scale is sufficiently accurate to weigh five grams of salt or yeast.
If you do buy a gram scale, Amazon’s algorithms will peg you as a drug dealer / user and start suggesting pipes, vials, and so on.
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I DO have and use a gram scale. It was just that all the recipes I see begin with a weight of flour and, actually, list other ingredients in grams as well. I understand that these things are percentages as well, but wanted to be sure where this started (total flour). I’d also suggest that new bakers wouldn’t necessarily know what weight of flour would make a ‘standard’ or ‘normal’ loaf, boule, etc…
For home baking recipes should give weights for all ingredients and they should be tested with those quantities.
By gram scale I meant one that displays weights in increments of 1/10 or 1/100 gram.
this is where i concur 100%. I avoid all bread recipes that only use volume measurements. A good bread recipe should be written as mininum by weight, and better yet, by bakers percentages --volume measures I feel are only added to appease the editors.
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Funnily enough, that’s exactly the reason I’ve never gotten around to buying one. And most of the ones I see are labeled “Jewelry scales”, which, yeah. If there’s any other non-science profession that would regularly need to weigh things in .01g increments, jewelers and gold/silversmiths would be one.
Maybe I’ll just pick one up for cash at the local smoke shop.
i really paid attention to lectoid when i saw them doing that serious stuff
honestly just build it on foodgeek… it’s the best way to store and scenario your bake metrics
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Foodgeek bread calc. is a fantastic tool.
His batard shaping method is my go to. He’s also encouraged me to not be quite so precious about separate autolyze and all that. A lot of things that WILL make a difference over a large, commercial production, simply get lost in the noise when you’re making 1-4 loaves by hand, at home, with basic tools.
Yep… Consistent temp range, flour freshness, how active the starter is and shaping is more impactful than autholyze
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