Though I’ve been somewhat quiet on the subject during the last week or so, I have not stopped experimenting with bakingness.

Never one to be satisfied with my prior accomplishments for very long, I knew that my initial success with baguette making would only spur me on to try for more.  There were several items I wanted to improve on after my first attempt, including taste, color and crunch.

To address the taste issue, I poured in what I thought was a reasonable amount of the Bride of Frankenstein.  I’ve always been somewhat of a kitchen rebel (as I believe most good cooks are) and even in an arena like baking, where a greater degree of precision is typically required, I tend to want to “wing it”.  I was fully aware that not measuring the amount of levain in the bread could ruin the batch, but I decided to go with my gut.  I have a pretty innate sense of how to properly do things, even when I’ve never done them before.  I credit this odd behaviour to many years spent observing my mother and stepfather in their restaurant kitchens.  Thanks for encouraging child labour, Mom and Dad!

Improving the colour of the loaf was easier though, and meant nothing more than increasing the baking time.  Trying to come up with the correct timing was a bit more difficult, and required much monitoring.  Once you’ve nurtured a loaf of bread for 3 or 4 hours, the last thing you want is to burn it beyond recognition.  Now that I’ve done it once though, I know that 7-9 minutes beyond what the recipe suggests produces a beautiful, hazelnut-coloured crust.  When experimenting, it certainly helps to have a baseline to work off of.

The crunch factor was wrapped up with the color quest, as the crust would automatically become crunchier the longer it stood in the oven.  I decided to give myself a bit of added security by upping the ice cubes required to produce the steam that immediately hardens the crust.  My attempts were only somewhat in vain; when I removed the loaves from the oven they were richly coloured, lightly crisped, and hollow-sounding when tapped.  After the bread cooled however, the crusts softened slightly, which must be why the recipe suggests that the bread is best eaten within 4 hours of baking.

So was my second effort a success, you wonder?  Just take a look at the photo below and decide for yourself.  My feeling is that while I’ve improved the prior showing by leaps and bounds, there are still many areas of improvement to be made.  The flavor of the bread was vastly improved by the addition of the Bride of Frankenstein, though next time I think I would throw caution to the wind and throw in even more.  The color was just a shade or two away from perfect, and only needs a minute or two longer to become that amazing burnished colour that signifies covetable bread to me.  As for the crunchy texture, well, I’m not certain that that is attainable with this particular recipe or even with my oven.  That doesn’t mean I won’t continue to try though.

Until next time…

Tags: Baking, bread, levain, New Projects

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 5:58 am and is filed under Baking, New Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.