Making a success of your miches and baguettes

Here’s some advice that will help you succeed in making the dough and in cooking your homemade sourdough bread in the form of miches (a round bread) or baguettes.

Working the dough

In most recipes you’ll be asked to knead the dough. However, at Boulangerie Desrosiers, we prefer to have the dough “work by itself.” Rest times are longer, but that lets you avoid having to knead the dough for long minutes. So it’s perfect for today’s busy schedules!

Just like kneading, our passive method makes the dough work so that gluten develops sufficiently. That allows the dough to be elastic enough to imprison the bubbles produced during fermentation. This is how you get a honeycombed bread with an interesting texture.

We recommend that you powder your work surface with a little flour to keep the dough from sticking. As indicated in our recipes, fold the dough on itself 4 times and let it sit 30 minutes between each folding. It will take between 3 and 4 foldings to develop the gluten sufficiently to make our bread.

Rest time

The key to success with your bread lies in respecting the indicated rest times. Your patience will enable the sourdough to do its work.

Baking

It’s important to preheat your oven. As soon as your bread is ready to go in, trace a few lines with a very sharp razor blade on top. This will allow the bread to expand a little more in the first minutes of baking.

When the internal temperature reaches 205 °F, remove your bread from the oven. Take it out of the pan and allow it to cool completely before slicing.

You’re now ready to get started on the production of your first sourdough bread. For more explanations, here are some additional articles:

Comments are closed.