Out of the fridge late afternoon Saturday:
Out of the box:
Fold:
Cover and fold four times at hourly intervals:
Shaping was a bit tricky – I didn’t feel I was getting any tension into the dough. Into couches and back into the fridge overnight.
Sunday morning, remove couches from fridge:
Roll onto baking sheet and slash:
Bake.
Bit warm for cutting as you can see from the tear bottom right:
Good game this.
The PArtisan Baker 
looks nice and soft inside, what’s taste like ?
Rick
You know, Rick, that might be a more significant question than you imagined. The taste is good and will probably develop like a good rye, but whether or not it’s worth the time and effort I’m honesty not sure. Eating breakfast yesterday we had a mixture of white pain a l’ancienne and my Classic Sourdough (50/50 white & wholemeal) and after a slice of ancienne the Classic hit you with a mouthful of flavour.
With the wholemeal I was left wishing I had flour from Felin Ganol.
Interesting! Saw your post above mine (http://sourdough.com/recipes/pain-l%E2%80%99ancienne-two-modified-versions#comment-4721) on Sourdough Companion–sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to link that. Anyway, I wonder, do you mean your classic sourdough is *more* sour than the white version of the bread in question? My pain à l’ancienne à la Shiao-Ping turned out quite flavorful, but I’m wondering if this means sour to most people. Thanks for posting your pics and process! I keep my starter at 100% too and converted it to 75% for my attempt at this, but it’s good to know you don’t need to bother with that. Do you still use the same weight of starter in the recipe and change none of the other weights? Or do you attempt to account for the extra water in the starter by lowering the hydration of the overall recipe? Maybe I overthink things like this too much, being an engineer in my past life.
Hi Cheesy
My breads don’t tend to be very sour – I meant more depth of flavour than sourness.
No, I never recalculate if I’m using starter at 100% and a recipe calls for a lower percentage. After my current experiences in France with no scales I might get even sloppier!
Mick
I see, and do you know of anything in particular you do to avoid too much sourness? I wonder if I ought to refresh my starter at lower temperatures, but it’s getting to summer here in Southern California and I may have a hard time of that for the next few months. I tend to keep it for 2 weeks in the fridge between bakings as well, would you think refreshing more often would help? Thanks!!
OK, that was weird (this is an update, by the way). Two evenings ago I mixed up another batch of whole wheat pain à l’ancienne, just after my first post here. I hadn’t really done anything different with my starter other than refreshing it at my usual 100% instead of 75%, and it’s actually been warmer here this week than last. I was experimenting with the ratio of hard red spring to soft winter wheat given in the Laurel’s Kitchen French Bread recipe, and miscalculated and put an extra hundred or so grams in, lowering the hydration in Shiao-ping’s recipe (although I noticed it was a bit stiff and tried to add in a little water before refrigerating). But I carried on with the whole thing, just baked it now, and it came out great! These baguettes are not sour at all, verrrry delicious! I read somewhere (maybe here on your blog, or maybe on Sourdough.com or TheFreshLoaf) that many problems beginners face work themselves out with practice. So, maybe that’s all it was, and maybe the extra pastry flour didn’t hurt. They also taste a lot less “wheaty” than the first batch from last week, so maybe that’s where that came in. Oddly enough, some rised better than others. Surely that is baker error in shaping, and will improve with practice. I even got a beautiful “grigne” on one of them, and inside the crumb was perfectly open! So, thanks for putting up with my brain dumps here, your site is a wealth of knowledge and I like your lax approach to baking (taking the bollocks out indeed–is that a bad word in Australia? To me, the ugly American, it just sounds funny).
Um, some *rose* better than others. Apparently I don’t write much.
I’m actually in North Wales, UK and bollocks is slightly risquee, but I think that’s just bollocks
Ah, I must’ve read “New South Wales” when you said that somewhere. Thanks again!