Bread - What are you baking today…..
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@dan79 my best tip is in the vein of “mo’ flour” but specifically I season the bannetons but also the formed dough, before I place it in the banneton. This seems to help although whether it is just more flour making the difference I do not know.
Another good idea is to wet or flour your fingers and loosen the dough carefully before removing it. It doesn’t damage the form of the bread and allows you to discover the sticky bits and deal with them before any damage is done.
Finally I would also recommend the Forkish levain method, specifically the one for the Country Blonde. This calls for the bulk ferment to be done overnight and the banneton proofing to be done the next morning for about an hour or two. It allows you make great fruity, buttery bread and to otherwise dodge the whole issue of sticky bits [emoji1]
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Looks amazing! @Chap
Thanks for the kind words and tip; I'll try and get hold of some semolina and give it a try.@neph93 I'm always pretty delicate when tipping out the bannetons, but will give your technique a try next time. As for the Country Blonde, I figured I'd try to perfect the pre-ferments and basic recipes first before moving to the advanced recipes, but as you say, the schedule for a levain bake is pretty convenient (much like the Poolish)
You guys have set such a high standard!!
Thanks for the advice. -
Judging by the look of your bread @dan79 you have all the skills you need to move on. If you go back to the start of this thread you’ll see some of my early “efforts” (disasters). I started with levain breads bodged together from internet recipes, then got my hands of FYSW and learnt poolish and biga techniques. With the exception of making your levain you know all you need to already.
Giving the bread a gentle fingering to check before twatting it out of the banneton by slamming the banneton onto a baking tray (I warm my fam when I’m going to do it it makes that much noise), helps a lot. It doesn’t damage or de-gas the dough at all, happily. I read somewhere that home bakers treat their doughs with a lot more reverence than they need to.
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This afternoon’s bake; 60/40 white & Cotswold Crunch, done as a one day bake (Forkish “Saturday white bread” schedule).
The sandwich tin loaf was still proved in a banneton, and then moved to a solid iron 2lb loaf tin, then covered with foil instead of transferring to a dutch oven.For anyone interested, the loaf tin was from Netherton Foundry:
https://www.netherton-foundry.co.uk/shop/baking-tins
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Lovely looking loaves @dan79
Busy weekends and hungry family meant a slightly creative baking schedule for me. Saturday morning I prepared two poolish and a levain starter and yesterday evening I was mixing and folding three lots of dough at the same time, a 100% white and a 80/20 eight corn, on the two poolish, and a Country Brown on the levain. I was baking the two poolish doughs around midnight and the Country Brown this morning.
The four Poolish loaves have been sliced and frozen and will be for breakfasts and lunch boxes this week (or at least the first half of it), while the two levain loaves were breakfast, lunch and dinner today.
The poolish:
And the Country Brown:
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Incredibly Impressive
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Wow. Thank you @adam313 @Giles @Chap really too kind. I have to admit that I was struck by the resemblance of my Country Brown to the jacket photo of FWSY, and it made me quite proud.
@Chap as for boring, personally I get as much pleasure looking at the same pictures of all our bread, as I do from looking at men in jeans all the time. Wait, that came out wrong… ???
Seriously you guys have set the standard that I am just trying to match.
