Tartine Baguettes and Fendu

My obsession with Tartine Bread continues, and this time I went beyond the basic country bread to make baguettes. The baguettes were a bit trickier to make than the country bread, as you have to carefully shape them and use a gentle hand to transfer them from a pan to a pizza peel to a baking stone. I could definitely use more practice, but practice means more baguettes, which I am totally fine with. I also need to work on incorporating salt into the dough since I did a pretty poor job of it this time. Some bites were really salty and awesome, and some bites were rather bland and required a generous smear of salted butter – win-win?

Aside from the shaping, the main difference between the two doughs is that the country bread relies only on wild yeast from the bread starter, whereas the baguettes begin with a combination of bread starter and commercial yeast. The country dough probably increases 30-40% in volume, while the baguette dough almost doubles, so instead of two large loaves of country bread, I ended up with four baguettes plus one fendu (basically an oval loaf that you press a hole into before the final rise and don’t score before baking) – that’s a lot of bread.

The ever-growing bowl of future baguettes reminded me of a song by The Doors, and you can sing it in your head while checking out the rest of the pictures.