The first recipe I’ve tried in the “BREAD” book by Jeffrey Hamelman was baguettes with poolish. It might nog have been a good idea, since the recipe calls for a**very wet dough**. There were some restrictions involved:**no mixer**! This means a lot of stretch & folding and french folding have to be involved.
I’ve been asked to bake a focaccia which uses the ciabatta dough. Last time the wet dough experiments were quite a “failure” so I was a little anxious to try this one out. This is the result:
[<imgclass=" wp-image-365"title="_MG_6704"src="https://redzuurdesem.be/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/MG_6704.jpg"alt=""width="800"height="600"/>][1]<figcaptionclass="wp-caption-text">The “holey” ciabatta looks good but hurts your teeth!</figcaption></figure>
Looks rather good, right? But there were some problems involved:
* The crust was very crisp out of the oven but turned soft after a few hours… I’ve learned this is partially unavoidable especially with higher hydratation percentage doughs.
* The bread was **very chewy**– a bit too much for my liking. I would have hoped it to be soft!
I more or less followed the recipe by the book except that I also added a 100% hydratation sourdough starter together with a little bit of commercial yeast to create the poolish. That might have been “too much”, I’m not sure. I’ll have to try the same recipe without that! _Shouldhave stayed with the book_ of course…
The “chewy”-ness is an issue I’ve been trying to get right for about a month. This is the last batch of “failed” baguettes with 75% hydratation:<figureid="attachment_367"style="width: 300px"class="wp-caption aligncenter">
I used [The Weekend Bakery][3]recipe and cut everything by half – except the yeast and salt. Whoops, how stupid. It turned out to be quite overproofed – even for one hour, I can’t exactly remember the time table on this one. I do remember I threw everything away since it was way too salty!
I**did use the same flour** for everything and I highly suspect this may be the nr. 1 reason why these wet doughs don’t correctly work out for me. I used white “all purpose” flour which can also be used for pastry. It’s called “molenaarsbloem” in Dutch and does not state any protein content. It’s not bread flour, nor high-gluten or “strong” flour.
Another thing I think I might have did wrong was**underkneading** since I did everything by hand and it was extremely difficult. I stretch & folded every 30 minutes for 2,5 hours (might even have to bulk ferment longer next time?!).
This is what I’ve been trying to replicate:<figureid="attachment_370"style="width: 300px"class="wp-caption aligncenter">
