Tangled Web

It was quite late in the day, but some bread was needed for the lunch boxes, so I was planning on starting some baguettes then retarding them overnight in the fridge for baking first thing. The recipe was for autolyse method baguettes from the R.Bertinet Crust book. I’d done these a couple of times and my son reckons it’s the best bread I’ve made yet.

The first bit calls for 950g strong white flour + 50g dark rye + 720g water to mix and autolyse for 30 mins. I like autolysing as it’s a very posh name for mixing + leaving for a while so you can nip off and have a glass of wine. I had a fair bit of rye leaven available, and substituted the 50g rye for 85g starter and cut the water back by 35g as the starter was 70% hydrated. I figured that it wouldn’t make that much of a difference as it was only for 30 mins, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, the glass of wine turned into half a bottle and feet up on the sofa watching a chick flick. By the time the film was over and the dough remembered, it was way too late to get to the stage where the baguettes could go into the fridge. Cue frantic searching of the internet to see whether autolysing could be overnight. Found a few references that indicated it could, so abandoned my dough to an extended rest.

Next day, the dough had started to ferment. Drat, I’d forgotten about the starter.  My starter must be pretty darned active to ferment from that small percentage in a very cold kitchen.  Decided to change this recipe into sourdough baguettes without yeast, as an experiment.

so, we have 1710g semi fermented super-autolysed wheat + rye mix as the “starter”.

add 150g more rye starter (70% hydration: I have a lot of this spare!)

+ 300g wheat starter (50% hydration, I was going to use this in the original recipe, also stored overnight, by now)

+600g flour (dove’s farm strong white)

+350g water

I made that around 70% hydration, roughly.

It was very sticky to knead, and very heavy, too (over 3kg)! Added 30g salt after around 5 minutes kneading, which made it a bit easier.

Left it to bulk prove for around 4.5hours, with folding after 2, then 1 hour. It definitely didn’t need any extra commercial yeast. Chopped it up into enough for 12 lots of 150g mini-baguettes + 2 smallish loaves, + 2 pizza bases. (I need a bigger freezer!)

Shaped, proved and baked as normal. The results were pretty good, considering it was more by luck than design. I will try something similar again, but maybe not quite as much dough…

lots of bread

Not bad slashes

close-up of crumb