Baking Davie Specials

French Big Boi Boule

By: Brian Lagerstrom

Big ol' Boule, you're going to want a Dutch Oven - error on the side of more water for the Poolish, and less water on the main dough portion (add the rest of the measured water later when mixing the main dough). Use that wet hand technique if you're doing this by hand. video reference

Prep time: 2.5 hours

Cook time: 45 ish minutes

Ready in: 4 hours

Ingredients

  • Poolish: 150 g or 1 Cup AP Flour (I use 150 g whole wheat flour)
  • Poolish: 150 g Water (room temp) or 2/3 C
  • Poolish: 1 Small Pinch Yeast
  • 280g Water (98F)
  • 2g or 1/2 TSP YEAST
  • ALL OF THE POOLISH
  • 350g or 2 1/4 C. AP FLOUR (I use 275g)
  • 50g or ROUGHLY 1/3 C. WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR (I use 125g)
  • 10g or roughly 1.5 TSP KOSHER SALT

Directions

  1. Mix up the Poolish ingredients and let that baby sit for 4 -24 hours, 16 hours minimum is optimal. Add enough water that it is relatively easy to mix, shouldn't be crazy hard to stir in all the dry flour
  2. Stir up the water, yeast and poolish at first to get well combined. (Sometimes if you didn't have enough water in the poolish, it will feel like gluten has developed. It'll be harder to mix, it doesn't "melt" into the water, but the bread turns out fine.)
  3. Now add the Flour and the salt and hand mix until thoroughly combined. This'll be pretty wet after this step. video reference
  4. Let sit for 30 min
  5. Now Stretch and lay across the dough and then do the tuck maneuver (real slacky boi) Ref Vid
  6. Let sit for another 30 min
  7. Give it the ol stretch and pull again, and cover again
  8. Let sit for 60 min
  9. Prepare the loaf with mini stretch and pull across around the whole thing, and then criss cross three or four times, then flip and tighten bun maneuver. Toss in bowl with t towel (heavily floured towel and top of boule) or 9" proofing basket. (uncovered when in basket) vid ref
  10. Let sit for 30-50 minutes (45 min), preheat your dutch oven to 500 in yo oven.
  11. Should be pretty large and buoyant now. Flip seam side down into perheated dutch oven (be a big dawg, but don't burn yourself). Turn your oven down to 485 and slam that dutch oven in.
  12. Cook at 485F for 18 minutes (covered dutch oven)
  13. Remove lid and cook it DARK AS THE NIGHT for another 25-30 minutes.
  14. Take that puppy out and listen to that crust sing.
  15. Tear into that puppy right away if you're going to eat it hot with some homies or if you just want to LIVE. Wait until near room temperature if you want to store it as a healthy well hydrated loaf of bread.

Notes

Freeze your loaf in a zip lock bag if you made more than one or need to save for later. Will reheat brilliantly.

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