Red Hen Baking Co. - Baguette
Red Hen Baking Company sits on a hill in the Green Mountains of central Vermont. Its owners, Randy George and Liza Cain started the wholesale business in 1999, making daily deliveries to large and small towns in the region. They are a certified organic bakery. This type of bakery, with its rural location and daily deliveries over a wide region, places some heavy demands on production practices, particularly baguette production, a product with a very short shelf-life.
From the beginning the Red Hen baguette was produced using a liquid levain added to a fairly wet dough of flour, water and salt. I had the pleasure of enjoying the original, and can recall its depth of flavor, its distinctly sour taste, its relatively dense - for a baguette- crumb, and thick, nutty crust. Randy, however, well aware of the elements of a true baguette: a creamy crumb color, a wheaty flavor accentuated through the use of a poolish and a thin crisp crust, knew his baguette was somewhat out of step with these standards.
To achieve this goal adjustments to the formula were made. To start, they reduced the amount of levain to around 10%. This reduced the acidity of the dough, and opened up the texture of the crumb. But they didn’t want to totally eliminate the levain nor the depth of flavor it contributed. Another reason was more operational: the increased acidity helped prolong the shelf life by a few hours.
The other change the dough underwent was the addition of a poolish. A poolish is equal parts flour and water pre-fermented with a small amount of yeast. This is a flavor building step but doesn’t allow for the production of the sharp tasting acids found in natural sour cultures. At Red Hen they blend the flour, water and yeast of the poolish 14 hours before the mix.
Those were some fundamental formula changes but the end result gave them what they were looking for - a more traditional baguette with a thin crisp crust, along with the depth of flavor and precious extra shelf life contributed by the levain.
Their production also employs some interesting techniques that, while not unique to Red Hen, are not often encountered. Red Hen uses a method called “double hydration” for the addition of the water to the mix. In this method 80% of the total water added to the mix is incorporated at the start along with the flour, poolish, levain, and yeast. The Red Hen baguette dough is quite wet - at times approaching 70% hydration. The double hydration method allows them to efficiently develop the gluten in this wet environment without over mixing. The remaining water is added later in the mix, after most of the development has taken place.
This first segment of the mix is an incorporation period of 1 1/2 minutes on reverse. Not all mixers have reverse but if yours does it is a great way to rapidly incorporate ingredients. Following this is an autolyse, or rest period, of 15 minutes, after which the dough is developed by mixing on 2nd speed for 1 1/2 minutes. The dough is almost fully developed at this point and the final 20% of water is added along with the salt and incorporated on reverse for approx 2 minutes and then final development is achieved on forward for a final 1-2 minutes. The final dough temp is 78 degrees.
The rest of the production is fairly standard but relies heavily on the bakers making the correct decisions and employing their skills in shaping and baking. Following the mix the dough is given two folds 30 minutes apart. It rests for an additional hour and is then divided into 12 oz pieces. 12 oz is somewhat smaller than a traditional baguette weight, but because the Red Hen baguette is 100% organic, 12oz allows Red Hen to achieve the appropriate price on the store shelves and remain competitive.
Red Hen baguettes are hand shaped, making them somewhat unique among wholesales bakeries. The hand-shaping contributes to the open crumb structure of their finished breads. The shaped baguettes are given 1 hour of floor time at 75 degrees and then retarded until the bake. Randy feels that 4 hours in the retarder is the limit for his dough and that 2-3 hours is ideal.
The baguettes are removed from the retarder and placed on the loader where they are given the traditional slashes. The baguettes are loaded into the oven and given a few seconds of steam. They are baked at 500 degrees F for approximately 25 minutes and cooled.
This article was originally posted: April 28, 2007.
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