I think an important part about getting tasty baguettes is to shape them correctly, and letting them rest for a long time before gently putting them in the oven. There’s a brief video on the initial folding below.
For this recipe, I aim for 72% hydration. Use 720 ml of water for every kilo of flour.
So, start with 333 g of flour, 240 mL of water, a couple of pinches of salt, and a teaspoon or so of dry yeast. Combine it all and work it into a nice dough. It’ll seem wet initially, but stick with it and wait for it to all come together. Adding flour now will mess up the hydration level and you’ll end up with denser bread. Return the dough to a bowl, put come cling film over it, and stick it in the fridge for 12-24 hours.
Dice up the dough into 16 or so bits (it doesn’t really matter). Make another 72% hydration dough, this time with 667 g of flour, 480 mL of water, 3 or 4 pinches of salt, and a teaspoon of dry yeast, and combine in the 16 bits of yesterday’s dough. Work this dough until you have a really smooth dough that you can successfully do the window-pane test. I’ve been doing about 10 minutes in the stand-mixer.
Put the dough in a bowl, cover it with some cling, and put it back in the fridge for another 18-24 hours. Feel free to check in on it, and punching it down a bit if it’s getting a bit big.
Divide the dough into 6 (I did 8 recently and it worked, too) bits, and make them into nice round shapes. Let them rest for a few minutes to let the gluten relax – it makes the next stage easier.
Now for the tricky descriptions. Grab one of the balls of dough and stretch it sideways, gently. Enough so you can lay the stretched bits back on top of the lump in the middle. Then roll it all forward, half way. Press down on the bit of dough that’s yet to be rolled onto, and roll it all the way. Then flatten the bit furthest away from you again, and roll it all together. Repeat for a third time, and set aside and do the remaining dough balls.
Shaping the baguettes
Start with the first bit of dough again, which should now be quite cylindrical. Roll it out with your hands to make the classic baguette shape. Now you can use some flour on the bench, because you won’t be incorporating it into the dough very much.
Place the baguette on a linen tea-towel that you’ve coated lightly with flour, and bring the teatowel up around it, so the next baguette you place in there will be supporting the previous, but they won’t touch directly. Let them rise here for 90 minutes or so.
Baguettes, resting in a linen tea towel (or couche)
Heat your oven up as hot as it can get, with a griddle-pan in the bottom (this is for adding boiling water, so needs to be reasonably deep, and heat tolerant).
Transfer the breads onto a baking sheet with some baking paper on it very carefully. If you upset them now, you’ll lose all the gas that’s inside that makes them fluff right up. Carefully slash the breads diagonally with reasonably deep cuts. (If you’ve coated them liberally with flour before resting and slashing, they will have gorgeous contrast between the cut and not-cut bits.
Boil a kettle of water.
Put the baking sheets in the oven very carefully, and pour the boiling water into the griddle pan which will bubble and steam. Quickly close the oven door, trapping the heat in the oven, and turn the oven down to 225°C. The moisture in the air in the oven will let the breads rise before a crust forms, which lets them rise more freely.
Bake them until they’re golden brown and delicious looking.
Take them out of the oven and listen for that delicious crackling as they cool.
While we were away on our mini-breakette we took many walks along the beach. It was windy, and gorgeous. This is from Normanville.
Shot with Olympus OM-1 with a red filter (25A), on Ilford FP4+ 125, developed in Ilford DD-X at 22°C for 8 minutes. Which is the standard method, just 2°C warmer than normal.
If you would like to flick through my film photographs, they have an album on Flickr.
Last weekend we had a little getaway to Sellicks Beach, and at sunset I decided to head up to the Nan Hai Pu Tuo Temple and see if I could catch a nice sunset photo. I didn’t love the locations I could get to easily (there are too many trees in the way), but I did notice that I could see something that looked like a windfarm on the horizon. I didn’t think much more of it at the time other than “that’s pretty far away!”.
When I was going through my photos from the trip I noticed the turbines again, and decided to check out how far away it was on a map. It’s about 70 km away. I did a quick search for a distance-to-the-horizon-calculator, and to have been able to see 70 km, I would have needed to be at about 400 metres above sea level. The point I was photographing is definitely not 400 mASL.
I fired off some pictures to friends, quipping that it was proof that the earth was flat – how else would I be able to see that far. What I was actually thinking (and actually tweeted) is “How good is refraction!“.
Then I wanted to know how far that refraction was bending the light, so that I could see the windfarm from behind the horizon, so I decided to sit down to do a bit of maths (hence the title of this post, and also the title of my new category).
I looked up the approximate radius of our fair Earth. It’s 6,371 km. Then I used this site to look up the approximate elevations of the Buddha and the windfarm. The ground at the windfarm is at around 20 metres. The Buddha is at about 140 metres. I figured a turbine was about 60 metres tall, and it looked like I could see about two thirds of them in the photo (remember – this is all a bit approximate and back-of-an-envelope), so I figured that 60 metres was a good approximation for the height of the windfarm end.
From there it was on to trigonometry, and I won’t type all that up here. Instead, here is the slightly messy calculation.
69.9 km!
The calculation of 400 metres elevation to see 70 km is assuming you’re looking at the ground at that height – basically assuming that you’re only calculating for x1.
South Australia’s main body of fresh (yet murky, and sometimes gross) water is the Murray River. The Murray starts in the Australian Alps, and heads towards the South Australian border. Along the way it meets its main tributary, the Darling River. Then it gets to South Australia, heads west towards Morgan, then south to Lake Alexandrina where it pops out into the ocean.
A primary trait of the Murray River is that it’s a slow moving river with several locks along the way controlling the flow.
There is nothing exciting about the Murray on the surface. No waterfalls. No rapids. So it feels a bit unexpected, and quite exhilarating, finding a waterway in South Australia with a decent waterfall on it.
Waterfall Gully and Morialta National Park both have some pretty waterfalls. They are also hugely popular with walkers, and even Third Falls at Morialta, which takes a bit more effort to get to than Second Falls, is quite busy at times.
We started to hunt for more out of the way waterfalls to visit, and here are the top three so far.
#1 – Ingalalla Falls
You don’t need to go far by foot to get to this watefall, but getting to the top of the lower falls is a muddy exercise. Bring some sturdy shoes, and maybe a change of pants, and enjoy the clamber.
Ingalalla Falls
#2 – Mannum Falls
Mannum Falls covers a huge area, and while it’s possible to drive to the upper carpark, I would recommend going to the lower carpark and walking in to the main falls. I’ve never seen Mannum Falls with a lot of water flowing, but if you time it right, you might find it flowing well!
Mannum Falls
#3 – Currency Creek Waterfalls
The short walk to the Currency Creek Waterfalls takes you under a rickety old railway bridge, featuring a rude galah. The falls don’t have a lot of vertical in them, but they do have a certain beauty to them.
That might be a bit dramatic. It’s definitely an exaggeration. But look! It looks like I’m about to get one back!
I’ve created a map of all the destinations that I’ve sent #tardigram postcards to. Looks like I might have to create one for where I’ve got them from, too.
Lovely!
To reiterate, if you would like to receive a photograph, lovingly photographed, developed, and wet-printed in the post, get to me your postal address and I shall make it so!
