Second attempt - Tartine Country Bread

This will be a short post as I just want to update what happenned after my partially successful first attempt to bake Tartine Country Bread

Lesson learned from last time - I think the dough was too overproof and I did not dust enough flour in the proofing basket, so the dough stuck when I flipped it to take it out for baking and I couldn't score the dough as the dough almost couldn't hold its shape.

I also found some great YouTube videos. I couldn't really tell from the book how to properly shape the boule and these videos are great. It gave me much more confident and the dough came out nicely this time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45z18TtFijU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5t-1sJwzFs

I planned to bake on Saturday, so I took out my starter (which is the leftover leavaining from last bake) from the fridge and fed it on Thursday morning, the left at room temperature. By Friday morning it became lively and doubled in size, so I fed it again to get it ready to prepare the leavain that night.

For mixing the dough and bulk rise, I followed the same steps as before, except this time I used Kitchen Aid to do initial mixing. Then hand knead after the first rest. Here're the photos of the dough after the first shaping.

First shaping after bulk rise

Then this time I put "a lot" of flour in the proofing basket. Below is the dough after 3 hours of rise of the basket.

Ready for

And this is the final product. This is where I found another issue with this book. Each loaf takes about 40-50 minutes to bake, and the recipe makes two loafs. So, let's say you can get the first loaf proofed just right, the second loaf could be a little overproof. In my case, I had no problem scoring the first loaf but second loaf didn't hold itself as well. I did the classic square scoring. The dough had pretty good oven spring, almost doubled in size. I think next time I will retard the second dough a little bit and see if that will help.

I should mention this time I used a lame bought from Sur La Table, which costs $5, instead of razor blade. I found that with the handle, it is safer as at least I didn't have to put my hand anywhere close to the cast iron skillet.

Another option is to line up parchment paper on a pizza peel, then flip your dough onto the pizza peel, do your scoring, and then slide the dough (with parchment paper) onto the cast iron skillet. I tried that on one of the loafs and there was no change in quality actually.

I think both loafs came out great - better than first time for sure. I still feel this can be improved even more, so hopefully will try that again after we run out of bread. This time I am able to do this along with working in the yards so I didn't feel like I used up the whole day just to make bread.

The next day, as usual, we had panini using the loaf I just made. Smeared the outside with butter, added cured ham, salami, pesto, fontina cheese, and spinach, and baked in panini grill at "high" for about 6-7 minutes.