It's been some time since I have followed good baking advice, my own or someone else's. Being a lazy baker makes me the last authority on deciding with caution or precision on good baking habits and tips. I suppose making mistakes can eventually change bad habits, with the price of flour, fuel being another reason to not make bread headed for the garbage bin instead of your table, so observe and learn.
First, flouring the cane basket with rye flour instead of wheat, why you ask? The case for using rye to flour a proofing basket could be described as just plain common sense. But who am I kiddng? Why just the other day while trying extract a a full 2 lb Miche into a hot creuset pan I found a sort of hanger on of sticky dough clinging to my German cane brot form,(Actually it happened on my last pot bread, but the finished product did not show as pronounced a flaw to make it look as if the loaf was misshapen or defective.) This can be sort of challenging to say the least. Not just the fact of plopping the dough in unceremoniously defies wisdom or just plain sanity. So after yanking the long strand of dough and laying it over the spherical boule like a bald man covering a spot with a long hanging wisp of hair, I plopped back the cast iron cloche into my oven and covered it with it's lid. Bloody hell!
The second bit of advice, is not to pre-heat your creuset to high, why? Unless you like your loaf sort of on the scorched side and a piece of dough stuck to the bottom of the pan, which would explain why there is a small hole on the bottom of the loaf. Lets just say it happened to me. Of course you could tell your friends that your French instructor from baking class back at school told you to bake the loaves darker for a croustillant quality, to give it that terroir taste or perhaps your researching ash content? Huh!
Since I have just succumbed to the idea that maybe Jim Lahey does have a good idea with his no knead baking in a pot method, however unorthodox; I still find myself combining several different baking techniques and methods. I flirt with the Dan Lepards hand mix, I use my mixer, or sometimes to relieve aggression I've used Richard Bertinets slapping and folding technique.
My friend Susan, rightly says to bake you must follow your own senses and not get hung up on rules, so mix and match for me has been useful.
\The Miche is a bread I truly love, it's the quintessential loaf of true French familial origins. It's rustique, its nourishing, just great to slice and slather, with it's deep nutty profile and long shelf life, well it's a bakers bread. This specimen even with my minor flaws is my favorite formula from Amy Scherber of Amy's Bread. It was featured in an article from an issue back in April/May 2002 of Pastry arts and design. I disregard the yeast and even retarded the dough due to my scheduling, generally I won't schedule a bake, bread to me seems so spontaneous,(actually I have a regular job that manages to screw up my baking time, so I am lying about spontaneity.).
In the past I haven't really liked retarding my dough, up until now. Through observation I found, (can you believe it, I observed, maybe I'm not so lazy after all?), that if you let the dough come back up to temperature, it doesn't blow out or have a grey looking finish. From my recent efforts, I've concluded that it's not the same to retard the bread in a home refrigerator as it is in a chilled retarding room found in bakeries. The temperature I think in a fridge at home registers say about 35 to 40 degrees. Though I can't say for sure I am assuming retarders are in the low 50 degree range, that could be the difference? When I was taking a class with Jeffrey Hamelman, he told us that you can plop the dough in cold, hasn't worked for me but Jeffrey probably could explain why and tell me a thing or two! I shy away from that only for the simple reason, it hasn't worked for me, so go with instinct or trial and error, but remember every loaf is different. At least I hope they are or it's wonder bread!