This weekends bread

This weekend, I made another version of marble rye and French bread baguettes. This version of marble rye was inspired by Reinhart's delayed ferment rye recipe from his whole grain book. I made a double batch and then split it into a light rye made with corn syrup instead of molasses an a dark rye made with some cocoa powder (0.8 oz) and a little extra water (1.6 oz). I ended up adding to much water so the next time I do this, I will do the cocoa to water in a 1:1 ratio. The other change I made was to put the loaves in bread pans after braiding. I did this to form more of a sandwich loaf which worked out pretty well.


The French bread is from Peter Reinhart's other book, The Bread Bakers Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. The baguettes could have baked a little longer to develop a crispier crust but otherwise it turned out pretty well.


To make the baguettes, ideally you should bake them on a large pizza stone to create that hearth baked effect. I have been looking at different pizza stones for a few weeks but all the ones I found were either really small or really expensive. However, a re-read of an earlier chapter in Peter's book suggested using unglazed quarry tile. This suggestion was confirmed by Alton Brown's Gear for Your Kitchen. So, $4.00 later and about 2 hours with a tile saw resulted in a set of tiles that fit into a half-sheet pan. Actually, I made two sets for the $4.00 so it works out to be about 20 times cheaper in material costs than buying one of them fancy stones.