Oh yes & I finally got a pizza stone- for $20. I've wanted one for awhile, so I could start doing some different kinds of bread. I tested it out this weekend by making totally the wrong bread for a first shot with a new pizza stone. I made a high hydration dough. I really had no business doing that at this juncture in my bread baking career. And I most certainly did not have any business whatsoever trying to shape the high hydration dough with nothing but my 2 hands & a couche. But hey my m.o. is go big, fail big - because maybe you'll succeed & if you don't, well then things can only go up from there.
Actually, the bread tasted really good, but my technique was an utter failure from start to the glorious 2-part finish of absurdity . 'oy' doesn't really cover it.
Started with a nice poolish:
20 minute autolyse - bread flour with a bit of graham flour thrown in:
mixed together the poolish & autolyse & added some yeast & salt:
2 folds in 2 hours:
& I had to face the fact that there was just no way in hell I was going to be able to shape this mess without some professional help. Googled technique for shaping high hydration doughs on YouTube. Tried to do this:
Ended up with this:
And there are no more process photos because the rest of the process (getting the dough off the couche, onto the back of a floured cookie sheet & then sliding it onto a hot pizza stone in a 500 degree oven) passed in a panicked blur.
This is my bread. It's pretty good. Sort of like a whole wheat ciabatta. The only problem is that it wasn't supposed to be a ciabatta.
This is how you learn.
