Baking this weekend

Dennis is becoming harder and harder to please.  I do not receive as many thumbs up on my baking as I had in the past   So today I removed all stops and made two of his favorite breads.  Baguettes and Croissants. 

I started the croissant dough on Thursday evening.  (For those who care it is 57% hydration with 50% butter by weight of flour.)  On Friday night around 10:00pm I formed the croissants and put them in the fridge covered for the night.  

Chris and I have an agreement the first person who wakes up after 5:00am for any reason will put the croissants in my proof box and turn on the oven.   I woke up at 6:00am did the same and crawled back to bed.  At 8:00am when I woke up again they were well proofed (actually the box was at too high a temperature.)  So I baked them right away with good results.

Result of this morning's hard work

I actually think Dennis really is excited about the baguettes. I have made croissants every weekend for the past four months so the Baguettes are a rare treat these days.  

For the Baguettes I choose the Baguette Traditional recipe by Fromartz.   I love the flavor that the sourdough and the whole wheat impart to the dough.  Plus I need help with my high hydration dough skills, for us mere mortals a 72% hydration dough is quite a challenge.  They do taste great even if they look less than appealing.  :)

I made the dough Friday night between croissants folding and shaping.  It is a fairly easy dough to make just dump everything in the bowl, mix it up, give it 10 minutes or so to rest, slap and fold for five minutes, and then fold it a few time before putting it in the fridge for the night.  The hard part is shaping in the morning.  

The results were good.  Everything tastes great and we will enjoy them through out the weekend.  However the the best part is that I made Dennis' morning!

It got Dennis' approval!