Sweet Rustic Bread, "Flute Ganachaud" and etc

Here's that sweet rustic bread from pizza night.  It's one of my favorites so far.  Moist, flavorful crumb with a pretty tender crust.  It's made with a poolish starter (from the same batch as the pizza).  In fact, Reinhart's recipe makes so much poolish that I did another round of rustic bread this week with extra that I had frozen last week.  Even after that I still had enough for the Ganachaud-style baguettes from Leader's book, which I think is the only recipe he gives that uses a poolish pre-ferment.

In addition to being delicious, the rustic bread requires essentially no kneading, which is awesome when you don't have a mixer.  The recipe calls for a couple tablespoons of olive oil and five tablespoons of sugar.  It's enough fat and sweet to make it a rich bread, but it is still very much bread and not pastry despite the fact that Reinhart pitches it as an alternative to croissants and calls for a powdered sugar topping.  It's great for jam, but really it would work for a lot of things.

After mixing the 2 cups of poolish (16 oz) with 4.5 cups of bread flour (20.25 oz), 2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tsp salt, 5 tbsp sugar, 1 cup water and 1/2 tsp instant yeast (or 3/4 tsp dry yeast), the dough rises for about 3 hours.  At this point it is kneaded with some flour for a few seconds before another rise of about an hour.  After the second rise, Reinhart has you pat the dough into a 6-inch diameter disk and cut 6-8 wedges.  The wedges then proof for a couple hours before going into the fridge for the night.

I took a lot of liberties with the recipe, adding a bit of water to make mixing easier and leaving the whole mixture together as a giant loaf rather than doing disks.  The timing was also a bit improvised and the final proof lasted a long time while focus was on the pizza.  The dough turned out great though.  Very bubbly.

So bubbly in fact that it ballooned in the oven.  Here it is doing double time with some pizza.

While the overall spring was really good, that extra puff was actually a giant air pocket that covered the entire top of the loaf.  I think that contributed to the beautiful color on this loaf.

Yum.  The crust is actually tender once it cools, so it wasn't like having a cracker on top of the loaf.

In addition to the pizza and the rustic loaf, I also made a big batch of sour dough and french baguettes using the same pate fermente technique.

Here's a sourdough boule ready to score and pop in the oven.

Group shot.  The rolls are evenly split between sourdough and french.

Now, with the extra poolish I had sitting in the freezer from the pizza, I made another batch of the sweet rustic bread and tried a new bread, which is Leader's interpretation of the signature baguette of a famous French baker named Bernard Ganachaud: la flute gana.

The baker's percentage is 9% corn flour, which I subbed with some really finely ground non-instant polenta I had.  I imagine it's the same thing more or less.  The baguettes turned out well, but I went out for drinks and overproofed them by probably 2 hours.  By the time I got back they were a bit saggy.  I also need to learn how to use my couche (linen cloth to hold dough) which I used to proof them.  I didn't even attempt the signature score which is a long slash that goes the length of the baguette.  All things considered they still came out pretty well if misshapen.  I'll have to try again.

As I mentioned, I also made a second batch of the rustic bread, which turned out quite well.  I did one smaller loaf and 4 disk-like rolls or what have you.