@Benito A friend sent me this video and it got me craving baguettes. I’m going to make your recipe next week. I have family visiting and I know my sister is going to absolutely love this crackly poppyseed crust.
Here’s the video – I think you and other baguette fans will enjoy:
Thank you for sharing that video Melissa, that was a fun watch. I’ll have to try the final shaping with the hands rolling in opposite directions. I’ve seen that before but never tried it. I would imagine that it might give the dough more hoop tension that way, even if it doesn’t, it looks like a fun challenge.
I also wanted to share another scoring diagram that I just made this week. I tried my best to draw on one of my photos of my shaped baguette dough, I wish I had an Apple Pencil.
The lanes are a bit askew but I think you can get the idea.
Thanks for the video link. What the prez of the baker’s guild said in the video confirms something I have suspected for awhile, but never dared say out loud … there is no ‘proper’ way to score a baguette, each baker does it their own way, like a signature. Here in the US the baguette scoring pressure, at times, has been tremendous. I have felt a little criminal for not scoring my baguettes with four lines, each the same length, each within the center 50% of the dough, each over lapping the previous line’s domain by 33%, etc. Usually, I just give the dough one long slash down the middle, exactly like the baker that won last year’s baguette competition does. Is he forging my baguette signature? I don’t care. This is so much bigger. Thank you, French baguette guy! Use my signature, I don’t care. Finally, I can breath a sigh of relief. A heavy load has been lifted. 
Interesting the winning baguette was sourdough, tho I would call it hybrid-sourdough™. Eating 30-million baguettes a day I would have presumed they were all simply wheat, water, salt and yeast. I think the recipe creators here on Breadtopia need to step up and create a hybrid-sourdough™ baguette recipe like the French baguette guy uses.
and with cake/fresh yeast too like the video! Eep I’m not sure where to source that lol
I likes the criss-cross score this baker had too.
@Benito Nice drawing. I’ll have to try the rolling in two directions style too, especially with the stronger flours.
I liked the etiquette section of the video…slice vs. tear 
I’ve also done these baguettes as a hybrid adding 0.07% IDY, not the fresh yeast but obviously you could apply a conversion if you used fresh. Given how little fermentation you give the dough it doesn’t become tangy in my experience, but if you wanted to reduce it even further you could do so by adding the yeast.
These days, my understanding is you can get cake yeast on the East coast, but only seasonally, during the winter holidays. Here on the West coast, we cannot get cake yeast at all. For us cake yeast is a thing of the past. So, when you do the recipe, please use instant yeast …
The baker in the video fermented his dough 12-24 hrs, enough for the sourdough additive to play its part with taste. But … he was fermenting at 3 degrees C, cold enough to suspend the activity of all yeast and most of the bacteria. So … ?
I do a long cold retard at 3ºC too usually 24 hours when I do these. I’ve measured the pH and it hasn’t gone below 4.48 so far by the time of baking.
I bookmarkd this web page many years ago, find it very helpful, use it frequently:
I also found this yeast converter calculator a while back. I find it useful since it performs unit conversions as well.
https://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/yeast_converter.html
Hello, I want to make these but I don’t have a starter culture going. Any advice for modifying this to use a poolish?
Thanks.
Nathaniel I’m sorry I’m just seeing your question now. To convert this to a poolish recipe you can follow this chart. I cannot recall where I found it but it works.
Poolish up to 8 hours in advance – 0.23% – 0.33% IDY
Poolish up to 12 hours in advance – 0.1% – 0.2% IDY
Poolish up to 16 hours in advance – 0.03% – 0.08% IDY
You can also then refrigerate the poolish/biga for a few days before use.
Those are baker’s percentages based on the total flour as usual. Put that amount of IDY into the levain column. Assume that the starter used is 100% hydration.
Total flour for the formula is 529 g so base your IDY on this. So if making the 8 hour poolish say 0.0028 x 529 = 1.48 g of IDY.
So your poolish would be 1.48 g IDY + 54 g water + 54 g flour.
Hope that helps and wasn’t too confusing.
Benny
