Friday, April 8, 2011

Whole Wheat Baguettes

This round of baguettes was a little different. I changed so many components (some intentional and some not so much) that I'm not sure what made the differences. Here are the changes:

  1. I made the biga the same way but it rested for half an hour on the counter before going in the refrigerator overnight. It was much less fermented looking compared to aging it two nights on the counter (understandable, since the refrigerator slows the process and it was a shorter time).
  2. I used 300 g of whole wheat flour, so about a third of the total. For how much the baby loves the bread, I'm trying to get more nutrition in it. I'd like to use more in the future
  3. I used unbleached all-purpose flour instead of bread flour. Oops! I think this made a big difference.
  4. After mixing the flour and water in step one, I added a splash more of water (maybe 30 g) since it was very dry and not coming together. That did the trick to make the consistency what I wanted.
  5. I more closely followed directions relative to times than I did last week which resulted in less rise time overall.
  6. I made five loaves instead of four and put three of them in the freezer just before they would have gone in the oven. We'll see later how this works out when I defrost and bake them.

And now for the differences we noticed.

  1. As I mentioned above, the dough was dry after combining all the ingredients, so I added a bit more water. My guess is that the whole wheat flour made this difference, but I don't have a lot of experience going back and forth between the two flours, so I'm not sure.
  2. The crust was great when it came out of the oven, but even just a couple hours later it didn't hold its crunch.
  3. The inside of the loaf didn't have the same holey texture as the last time. It was more like a regular store bought loaf of bread.

Next time, I will go back to the longer aging of the biga, stick with the same amount of whole wheat flour, and do my best to use bread flour. I may take a loaf out of the freezer tonight to defrost on the counter overnight and bake in the morning. Hopefully it works!

Here's a picture of the whole wheat baguettes in the couche for the final rise.

1 comment:

  1. The frozen baguette which you baked and gave to us for our ride home was delicious! No problem freezing the baguettes before baking.

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