Today… Baguettes !

The Australian Forum is having a Baguette bakoff, and I was asked to submit. So today I baked up six one pound Baguettes. I just used the Basic White recipe on my site at :  http://www.northwestsourdough.com/recipes.html , and I added a cup of motherdough. If you don’t know what motherdough is, do a search on my blog here, there are some other posts about it. I mixed up the dough yesterday, but instead of shaping the loaves and putting them in the refrigerator, I put the whole bowl in the refrigerator and warmed up the dough and shaped this morning.

I also added the salt just before shaping. I had six pounds four oz of dough, so since I made six – one pound loaves, the 4 oz was made into a miniature loaf by my five year old daughter.

I let the dough pieces rest for about 20 minutes after cutting and weighing them. Then I shaped them into Baguettes. I probably don’t do it right, but since no one has ever shown me, I just do it my way:

I fold over and pinch a seam tightly each time I roll it longer. Then I put it into the couche:

Here are all of them finished and proofing:

Then slashed and into the oven:

I started with one loaf because I felt the rest could use a bit more proofing, but I had to start or the last would have been overproofed. So here is the first loaf:

Then I popped two into my oven, here they are after the first five minutes:

So when these were done I had three:

Here are all six Baguettes together:

Closeup:

Here is the crumb:

Much fun to bake, I must do this again!!

Oh yea, here is my little daughter’s loaf, isn’t it cute?

Baguettes from other sites:

Sourdough Baguettes