Has Anyone Here Tried Reinhart's Pain a l'Ancienne

[Willy]

Have any of you tried making Peter Reinhart’s Pain a l’Ancienne bread (from "Bread Baker's Apprentice"). It sounds very intriguing, but the 80% hydration rate scares me.

[RonB]

I haven't made that bread, but I do see two key points. First is using lots of flour when you shape. Second don't press down on the dough any more than absolutely necessary.Using lots of flour will help overcome the difficulty of working with high hydration doughs and not pressing down will give a very open crumb.
I made some French Bread last year that turned out very well, and I think the key was handling the dough very gently.

BTW - My copy of BBA has disappeared - I think I loaned it to someone and never got it back.

[Willy]

Thanks, RonB! I did notice he called for a lot of bench flour. BTW, sorry for your "loss", but there is a new edition of BBA (good excuse to buy it!). It has some corrections and refinements and it now includes metric weights. It also did away with that goofy way of expressing the preferment as a % of the flour in the final addition-actually still there, but another table is added to give entire batch %s.