My word it's been a busy day today!  We had three batches of baguette dough to make, shape & bake, as well as setting down the pre-ferments for tomorrows bake, so it was all hands to the deck!

The first batch we made was the baguette dough using old dough (otherwise known as pate fermentee), then the baguette using a poolish, & finally the baguette using a wheat levain & poolish.

Once the doughs were made up & bulk fermenting, we had some free time, so out came the lovely 'dead dough', & it was back to practising our scaling, moulding, shaping & plaiting!

Think I've finally gotten the hang of the single knot; they came out much better today & I found it quite a lot easier to shape them, which was rather pleasing  =)

My plaiting wasn't too bad either.  I'd like some more practise (which I think we may get tomorrow!) & I'd also like to try plaits with more strands, see if I can get the hang of those too!  I have done an eight strand plaited loaf before, but it was quite a while ago & I've only done it once!

The baguettes made with old dough, & those made with a levain & poolish worked rather well; the dough proved nicely & they were quite nice to shape, if a little sticky.  I think my scoring has come on a lot; I found it easier to place the blade correctly, & while they weren't all perfect, they did look quite good  =)  Once they were all baked off, we had quite a fetching selection of bread!

The baguettes made with poolish however, were another story...

The dough was quite difficult to handle, very sticky, but we managed to get it divided & pre shaped all right.  When we came to final shape the dough, the pieces had gone very flat & limp almost; they had no strength left to them at all.  We got them all shaped & on a couche to prove a final time, but when we came to lay them out for baking, we had rather a surprise...

The dough was extremely extensible, ridiculously so, as you can see from the photo above!  It was stretchy enough to be used as a skipping rope!  It was hilarious!

We think this was because the poolish we set down yesterday was rather warm once it had been mixed; 32 degrees C!  Although the poolish was kept in the back room overnight, which is always nice & cool, it may not have cooled down quickly enough, meaning the yeast in the mix worked too quickly, exhausting itself before it was mixed into the main dough today... It was a bit disappointing, but we've all learnt a lesson from it & that's what counts really  =)

There was no way to rescue the dough & salvage any sort of baguette, but we baked it off anyway, for Jill to take home to feed to her pigs  =)

Once we had recovered from the skipping-rope-dough incident, we moved onto setting down the pre-ferments for tomorrow.  A rye levain & poolish for the first set of baguettes, then a seed soaker, poolish & levain for a multigrain campagne baguette  =)

Finally, we were done & it was time for a brisk walk home in the drizzle with Clare  =)

It feels really quite good to be back at School & baking again, I've missed it more than I realised!