Bad-guettes

My blogging hasn’t been keeping pace with my baking over the last few weeks. I’m going to quickly describe my three most recent experiments. I worry though that these constant reviews of my breads are become a bit samey. Also it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find good material for my review section. My wife has become wise to my writing style and is now cagier when reviewing my culinary cock ups.

So from next week you should see some changes to this blog. Hopefully I’ll find a half decent photo to use as my banner. That would make a colossal improvement right away. I’d also like to create a section dedicated to the baking techniques that I’ve acquired, so that you my readers can emulate my mouldy, half risen, crustless, arse shaped wonders. Perhaps I’ll also post some material on bread culture in Singapore. I’ll be out on the streets testing whether my appreciation of pre-ferments can earn this lame white-boy some respect in the backstreet bakeries of Joo Chiat and Geylang. But for now…..

Baguettes with Fermented Dough

TV dinner par excellence. Crusty bread served with the wife’s home cooked carrot, orange and cumin soup.

For this loaf I’ve followed Richard Bertinet’s reipe for french baguettes. However my oven is barely long enough to bake a french breadstick. So instead I’ve shaped the dough into batards as per normal. Like my last loaf this recipe is another long, drawn out affair with lumps of dough left for long periods in our family fridge to grow, become smelly and change colour. Happy husband, unhappy wife. The major difference is that this time I’ve used a ferment instead of a poolish. The result is a loaf almost identical to my previous attempt but with a darker chestnut brown crust. It has the same light texture and a delicious dept of flavor.