In fact the whole week was really busy as we'd had several large orders and I was frantically working on a new logo to send to the printers before we ran out of stickers. I was on antibiotics trying to finally kill this bronchitis that was cramping my style. I hadn't been to the gym all week. My brain was pretty much at the end. So I let my animal brain take over and sloppily put together my second week's baguette.
This time, I added a touch more yeast (now a total of 3/4 tsp). I also followed the proportions of flour and water a little more closely so the dough was quite a bit more stiff. I didn't do an autolyse, but had wanted to add the salt right before kneading; however, I forgot to add it until after I kneaded a bit, so I ended up adding the salt about half way through the kneading process.
It was tricky to get the salt incorporated into the dough which felt a little bit like it had just come home from the beach. When I stopped feeling granules, I stopped kneading and let the dough rest for a little while while I jumped upstairs for more work on the new logo.
When forming the baguette, you're supposed to form it into a rectangle and then let it rest for a few minutes to relax the gluten. I was in a rush so I just tried my best to roll a perfect cylinder. As I was transferring it to the sheet pan, I realized it was probably too big, so I cut it in half and tried to tidy up the ends. I thought about starting the reforming process again, but decided against it. I let it rest for about 30 minutes, then slashed it and sent it to the oven.
As you can see,I'm still not getting the slashes deep enough as there are a couple of blowouts at the base of the baguette. Also, what I suspected would happen is the salt, not having totally dissolved, made little salty spots on the dough. What's different is I sprayed this with water before loading it into the oven so the color is a little better, but the exterior is still not even close to what I want.
The flavor is good, a little chewy, but not quite light enough to be the baguette I'm wanting. We're officially out of stickers, but the logo is not ready. Will have to figure out a way to get just a few more stickers printed (not my usual 10,000).