Bread Log 1: Baguettes with Poolish

So this is the first type of post you'll see on this blog.  The Bread Log posts will detail results of my most recent baking.  Much of the information I list will be for my own benefit if I try to re-create a bread in the future, or decipher what went wrong with the last batch.  That being said, there will be pictures from the process and hopefully when I make mistakes someone out there can learn from them, cause lord only knows I manage to make some of them with frightening consistency.

As I mentioned in the last post I've decided to work my way through Jeffrey Hamelman's "Bread", in order.  Fittingly the first formula is for Baguettes with Poolish.  You'll see a lot of titles that look like this "Bread with X"  odds are if the X isn't an obvious addition like whole grains, garlic, herbs . . . etc, it's a pre-ferment.  So don't sweat if words like poolish and biga mean nothing to you.  I'll deal more with what a preferments in a later installment of the second type of post you'll see here: Breaducation.

Yup, that's the tier of humor you can expect from me, flee now while you still can. 

So suffice to say a preferment is a way to increase the flavor of a bread, increase it's longevity, and get by with less yeast.  They come in many different shapes, and in the case of Poolish that shape is a big goopy mess. 
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This is the Poolish the afternoon before the bake.
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And this is the same Poolish after the yeast have had a grand ol'e time for around 14 hours.

The bake went fairly well, though the dough developed much more quickly during the bulk fermentation than I would have liked ideally.  This bake was on the first day where the temperature really started to jump up here in MN, and it really caught me by surprise.  That's one thing I've really had to adjust to as a home vs. commercial baker, with the relatively small quantities of dough, temperature shifts have an increasingly large effect on it's development.  While the apartment was only 70.5 degrees when I started that morning it had probably gone up a solid 10+ degrees inside (and was probably breaking 90 outside) before I thought to turn on the little window unit.
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Here are 2 of the demi-baguettes (I couldn't fit a full baguette into our little 3/4 sized oven even if I wanted to) before getting slashed and thrown into the furnace. If they look a bit flooby to you, right you are!  I tried a new shaping method and didn't get as much tension in the dough as I'd like.  That combined with the temperature issues made for a bread which didn't want to hold it's slashes and pancaked (flattened out) more than I'd like.  Here is a pic from the finished product:
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As you can see the slashes are pretty shallow, particularly on the one at the bottom there.  The crumb however looks quite good:
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Forgive the yellowing caused by our crappy kitchen lighting.  Here were the details from the bake:

Room Temp: (initial) 70.5
Flour Temp: 69.1
Water Temp: 88.1
Final Temp: 77.8
Mixed 3 minutes on speed 2, then cut with scraper, then mixed 3 minutes on speed 3.
Just under 2 hours of bulk fermentation.
2 Shapings
1.5 hours bench proof
~25 minutes bake at 450
1/2 cup of water for steam, or whatever of that I can manage to keep from escaping before I shut the oven door.

Thas all for now!  I have the topic for the first Breaducation post already in mind, and have done one other bake so far this week. Both should make it up soon I hope.

Thanks for reading!

Vino