I have been trying something new with my starter. The morning I make bread dough I refresh the starter, let it sit on the counter a few hours, then place it in the fridge. This is typically on Fridays. The following Tuesday evening I remove it from the fridge and let it sit out on the counter overnight. Wednesday and Thursday mornings I refresh the starter. Thursday night I make my leaven. Then, depending on how much I used, I will either refresh to make up what I removed or let it sit on the counter and refresh on Friday morning and repeat.
I have been pulling some of my bread baking books off the shelf and re-reading them. This week it has been The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz. This was published in 1997. I had forgotten much of the material in the book including some of the recipes I wanted to try. I had not remembered the stories of Joe driving all over southern France buying rye breads or siegel in French. I never realized rye breads were so popular in France. I can’t imagine an 8 kg loaf of rye bread. That would make a lot of rueben sandwiches!
I also hadn’t realized that all the bakeries in France used the same formula for baguettes. 100kg flour (t55 all purpose), 60kg water, 2kg salt, 1 kg yeast or an amount of each in the same ratio. The big difference is each bakeries process on how they treat the ingredients. Some make a straight dough, some make a sponge with a portion of the flour, yeast and salt and make a pre-ferment, others may use some of the dough from the previous days batch and so on. The other big variable is the flour. I read recently of a small farm organically raising wheat and milling flour. They started small and could only supply one bakery. That bakery started winning the prize for the best baguette in France which they did for several years in a row. The farm grew and started supplying a couple more bakeries and they too started winning prizes. Salt and water are also variables. Some argue only flake sea salt from Normandy should be used. Just goes to show how serious the French are about their bread.