First up, whole wheat pain a l'ancienne mini baguettes from Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. These guys are pretty easy. Mix the ingredients, do a few stretch-and-folds, and then throw it in the fridge over night. Then in the morning pull it out of the fridge, wait a bit, chop into strips, and toss in the oven.
The one on the right turned out quite nicely. I used a dough scraper to chop the bulk dough into the individual loaves. This left a nice straight slit on each piece of dough. This is a super high hydration dough, so scoring with a knife or lame is quite challenging (i.e., almost impossible). I baked these loaves slit up and they opened up nicely, as if they had been scored! I tried to score another loaf in the traditional baguette style, but it really didn't work very well. (I ate it before I took the photos...)
They taste great! The crumb is quite dense, as you'd expect for a 100% whole wheat loaf, but not gummy (which is challenging to get around in whole wheat breads). I ate the loaf not photographed here for lunch with gorgonzola cheese and some pickled beets.
Next up: Miche Pointe-a-Calliere from Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. I've tried to bake the Vermont Sourdough--what seems to be the most popular formula from this book--a couple of times without success. (I just can't get it to rise. I think there are two problems, it's fairly cool in our apartment about 70F, which is well below the recommended 76F, and I was using all purpose flour instead of bread flour, which I've had good results with in the past, but perhaps this formula can't handle that substitution. I'll try it again soon.) So I decided to try something different. Hannah got me some red fife flour at a farmer's market last week. Based on Hannah's description of the vendor's description of the flour--and what it looks like--it appears to be high extraction flour, so I thought I'd try the Miche Pointe-a-Calliere.
I halved the formula because I didn't want to bake an almost 4lb loaf since it's just me eating it. I also took one shortcut: I used a 100% hydration levain, instead of the suggested 60% hydration, because that's what I had on hand. (I should have thought ahead by about 6 hours, oh well.) To compensate for the cooler temperature in our apartment I slightly extended the bulk fermentation, and extended the proofing by about an hour. (And it still might have been a bit under-proofed.) I still baked it for the recommended hour even though it was half the size of the standard size (a bold bake!) and it seems like that was a good call.
It's still cooling...
