baguette notes

Having recently sampled the village baker's traditional baguette in La Borne, Menetou-Salon, Bourges, Henrichemont and a few others, I'm back on the trail with the biggest challenge being I'm making a couple in a home oven vs big batch in a commercial oven.  My thinking lately has still been with covered baking in order to get a crackly crust, but instead of an inverted pan, I'm switching to keeping the bread in the pan similar to the dutch oven variant.  However, a baguette is a little trickier since there aren't many 20"+ cast iron pans.  I can't even find a 20" pullman.  Anyway, just a couple photo notes.

Crackly yeasted boule from Dutch oven.

Cooking in an aluminum tube capped with foil.  I slid out the par baked loaf and let it crisp in convection.  Logistically a pain, but the bread showed pretty good volume.

A little snipping of the aluminum stove pipe and tabbing the ends to close it off and I might have a custom length baguette pan.  Off to testing.  The bread shown is not from this design but another covered type baking.  I used an inverted foil tent.  The inverted from top just isn't going to entrain the native moisture adequately like a Dutch oven can, the bread needs to sit in the pan.  Here goes...

Next iteration.  This one baked in an aluminum tube pan (on parchment) and the top covered with foil until the last 5 min.  Not bad.  Crust and docking looks ok, flavor and texture good.  Not great.  Next iteration just fabricated...