Breadmakers

[ZenSojourner]

The book says the dough will be too wet with bleached flour due to a lower protein content. It's a wet dough to start with. It's not a regular bread recipe. I think I'd rather make it the way they tell me to to start with and then see if I can change it. They do give a conversion factor for using bread dough, but say the bread will be denser and chewier because of it, I'll probably go ahead and try that.

If you'll give me your adaptation, I could try that too.

And I actually do need baking powder, for the banana bread recipe a friend of mine gave me recently. That's why I've had baking powder on the brain, then BleekerSt_Girl mentioning it made my brain jump a track.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Yeah, baking powder is fine for making biscuits and banana bread and such.
Definitely not in the plan for the crusty yeast breads though.

Smilingcat- I have been faithfully using the steam pan under the baking stone as recommended in the Artisan bread book....and it seems to work fine.
When pouring in the water, you have to be very careful not to drop even a drop of water on the extremely hot 450F oven door glass- I hear it can crack the glass window of the oven door if you do that! So I am very careful when I add the steam water.

[ZenSojourner]

There is a baguette recipe in the Artisan Bread book, but I can't find my peel anywhere. I think it may have warped in storage and got tossed, but who knows.

I'm getting this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Peel-Sol...1213503&sr=1-1

The manufacturers site has videos of it in use:

http://www.superpeel.com/videos.html

Yeah, it's a little pricey, but apparently the problem I've had with baguettes in the past is picking them up and moving them makes them "degas". Eg collapse and turn into bats.

It's actually a little cheaper than the one they had at Target.

I figure I can do without a bread knife (I should be able to use a steak knife for slashing the loaves, they're serrated too).

I've got the baking stone, don't really have to have parchment paper, but I do need a peel.

Has anybody tried the artisan bread recipe for baguettes?

[Tuckervill]

I just use a wooden cutting board instead of a pizza peel. I have to use both hands and open the oven all the way, but it works just fine.

I didn't want to spend $40 on a peel at Williams-Sonoma (that's the only place I could find one locally when I was looking). So I tried the cutting board and it worked fine.

Karen

[ZenSojourner]

No wooden cutting board either. Mine are all poly, and they're either huge or tiny.

I already sprung for the peel, anyway, LOL!

[Tuckervill]

Does anyone else find the basic bread boule recipe a little salty in the final product? I like bread a little salty, but it seemed to salty to me the last two times. I asked my friends who had some this morning--one of whom avoids salt because she has Meniere's disease and thus recognizes salty taste more--and she didn't notice it very strongly in the bread, but her husband said it wasn't "too" salty. I like the bread a lot, but I noticed the salt, and I LOVE salt. I even decreased the salt by half a teaspoon this time.

Karen