Whole Wheat Baguettes

Since my last post, I've made a habit of weekend bread-making (at least for the last two weekends). Last weekend, I made a larger batch of 4 baguettes using the Pain l'Ancienne Recipe -- this time switching to a 5 parts white : 4 parts whole wheat flour combination (mostly because I ran out of hard white bread flour).

From what I understand, whole wheat is not meant to rise as much as white flour given the lower gluten content. My experience last weekend was mixed -- the overnight rise in the fridge was quite aggressive, but despite the large overnight rise, the crumb in the finished bread was more dense than in the all-white baguettes made last month. This may have been from the 20 minutes of kneading when I prepared the dough (I've read that longer kneading times result in more dense crumb) but was surprising given the extent of the first rise.

But who cares - the bread tasted great. I was able to give away a baguette to my parents, our friends Rich and Anne, and as a parting gift to our friends Marie-Eve and Rick who are moving to Chicago. Bread makes a great gift, or at least it does in my case since my friends are so shocked that I've actually started making bread. No one had 30 in the "age at which Rob will finally make bread pool". I've also discovered that people don't mind if you stop by unannounced when you give them free bread. A few pictures of last week's bread below.

Dough after overnight rise -- bubbling with whole wheat goodness.

Finished baguettes. The whole wheat content also seems to result in a darker crust. Even though it was almost a 50/50 mix, the crumb had a good, strong whole wheat taste to it.

This weekend, I made it to Rube's in the St. Lawrence Market to pick up several pounds of organic hard white flour, as well as some organic hard whole wheat flour. Even though I'm keen to start on some other recipes, work is looking busy this week, so I decided it wouldn't be a great week to go through the process of bringing a sourdough seed culture or starter to life. So, this week's offering involved more baguettes -- this time with a 350g white 100g whole wheat mix, and a smaller 2 baguette batch. One baguette will be staying with us, and we'll be giving away the other to our good friends Jim and Sarah, who have shown an interest in my bread making and have accepted my minor obsession with the Queen & Beaver.

These are the large glass containers we picked up from IKEA today to store the copious amounts of white and whole wheat flour I bought yesterday. I think they're great, and Lisa enjoys them as well since it eliminates the leaky plastic bags of flour that have been dusting our pantry (in our case a 10-inch wide cupboard). I hope that they also provide Laura with some comfort that she's not the only person who enjoys containers and order.

This week's bread cooling. I've tried to up the artistic flair of the bread and have gone with "X"s instead of diagonal cuts. Next weekend I will be carving in Greek symbols to mark the sovereign debt crisis and my nerdiness.

This week's bread with some pecorino from the market.