The twenty-sixth Bread Baker's Apprentice challenge (from the book by the same name authored by Peter Reinhart) is Poolish Baguettes, and is found on pages 213-214.
This
is
a
two-day dough: a small amount of time on the first day to make the
poolish and then it sits in the
refrigerator overnight until the next day when you do the shaping and
baking. Di, Margaret, and I were making this together on Twitter this
weekend, Friday and Saturday, but someone (that would be ME) forgot to
make the poolish on Friday, so it ended up being a Saturday and Sunday
deal instead as they were kind enough to wait on me even though Di's
poolish was threatening to overtake her refrigerator...we all agreed,
this was one really nice dough to work with.
Whole Wheat Flour, Bread or AP Flour (I used AP),
salt, yeast, and water are all you need. Mixing is easy,
the shaping is something I need to work on, but I'm a rookie so I just
call all my breads "rustic" and leave it at that. No one here seems to
mind.
The recipe makes 3 small baguettes, but I wanted to use my bannetons, so
I made one long thin baguette and then one shorter, more oval in shape
baguette because that size works better for sandwiches for the guys,
which is how they will use it this week.
Although the recipe is simple
and straight-forward, I did note in my book that there is a lot of
sitting around time, i.e. 4 hours on counter with the poolish the first
day, and then the next day the bread dough has two 2 hour rises and then
another hour rise after it is formed. That's a whole lot of rising
times to factor into your schedule if you are out and needing to be back
at certain intervals. Was it worth it? Absolutely...this is one of my
favorite breads for taste alone so far. Definitely a repeat, Mark was
especially thrilled with it.