Working Out...

Starting today, this week I no longer divide the baguette dough in the morning, but divide and shape the biological bread which includes the pain aux 6 cereales, L’Authentic, T80, Epeautre, Campagne, pain complet, seigle Auvergne and pain au lin.

We do various shapes and sizes with the different doughs, ranging from “boules” or round loaves, to “miches” which are a longer, tapered oval shape, shorter than a baguette but much thicker. “Batards” or small ovals, and the large “flutes” as well. Some of the doughs are coated in either seeds or maybe oats or dried maize after shaping. For instance, the pain aux 6 cereales is coated in rolled oats which gives it a really nice almost peanut butter flavour when cooked.

Alexandre showed me some techniques to shape things really quickly and it really is insanely fast at a slight loss of regularity but that’s just because I’m not used to the method and the wetter dough as well. I think within the week I’ll have it down. When you see the movement of the shaping it makes sense in terms of flow and tightness/strength of the shape.

After shaping was done, I did the autolyse for the pate blanche (the base dough for all the baguettes we make)...200kg of dough is no laughing matter...

i lug 4x25kg bags of flour up from the cellar each morning and then have to take all the dough out of the mixer for the autolyse and put back for the final mixing.

Otherwise a pretty normal day. Finished really early so left work at like 10:30...did my weekly grocery shopping and then just chilled.