Back to the Baguettes

  

  
You know, I really was very happy with the way the original baguette recipe turned out. It was delicious. The thing is, I actually wanted to make a baguette like the ones you get at restaurants for putting cheese spread on. They're extra chewy, and they have holes in them. The original recipe didn't quite do that, besides being fiddly. So after all my other bread experiments, I returned to the idea of a baguette recipe for a lazy person.

1. Make the magic pizza dough recipe.
2. Let it lurk in the bottom of your fridge for a week. Really.
3. Preheat the oven to 470.
4. Poke the air out of the dough, but don't knead it.
5. Divide it in half, and pull and twist each half into a rope about 18" long.
6. Let them rise for about an hour.
7. Put them in the oven, and just before you close the door, pour about 1/4 cup of water on the floor of the oven.
8. No peeking for the next 20 minutes!

All those 'artisan bread' recipes, and all that hoopla, and all those arcane formulae, and all that nonsense? Totally unnecessary. The thing with dough is that if you mostly leave it alone, it will make itself! Just squish together the ingredients, let them sit around in the cold until they smell a little funny, let them poof up in a warm place, then cook them until the outsides are crunchy. Please try it, it's positively magical.

That was the enthusiasm part. Here's the slightly technical stuff. If you're feeling nervous, you don't need to read all the crap below, it's just me geeking out. As long as you follow the 8 steps above, you'll do just great.

- I cannot recommend a bread machine strongly enough. You put stuff in it, press a button and boop it makes dough. Awesome.
- You notice how much of this recipe is just waiting around. Yes, dough makes itself, but it does so in it's own good time. Fortunately, you can ignore it while it does its thing. I set myself a timer, or I will forget about it.
- The water on the oven floor is what makes the outsides of the baguette a little blistery and more chewy. I've heard some people recommend a couple ice cubes, but I don't have those in the winter. Why would I? It's cold out. In either case, it's important for the oven be very hot in order to turn the water into a cloud of steam, which means that:

- I really do want for you to have the oven on for an hour before you put anything in it, that isn't a mistake. For one thing, the stove top makes a nice warm place to proof the baguettes (do be aware that many ovens have a vent that comes out through one or the other of the back burners. This'll make a hot spot in that area, so make sure you don't put the dough right over it or you'll cook it to death), and for another, I'm assuming that you don't have a convection oven. My oven is a regular old not at all special electric, and leaving the oven on all that time ensures that the oven itself, not just the atmosphere inside it, is well hot before putting anything in there.
-This has to do with the behavior of ovens. An oven has a thermostat in it. That thing measures the temperature of the air inside the oven, and when the air temperature is up to say, 470, the oven says that it's pre-heated. Should be fine, right? Well, yes and no. When you open the oven, all that hot air flies out the door, and the temperature falls. That would happen no matter how long the oven had been on, but if the mass of the oven itself has not had time to accumulate heat, it will take much longer for the air inside it to return to the correct temperature, especially if you put a tray of relatively cold dough and a couple ice cubes in it. Moreover, after an hour, the heat is radiating off the whole oven evenly, not just off the oven elements on the floor. High, steady, even, heat and a shot of steam is what makes fancy looking bread.
- What if you don't want to wait a week for your bread? You can just leave the dough in a container on your counter overnight, instead of in the fridge, but this is slightly uncontrolled. In the winter, it works fine for me because the temperature of my house is pretty low at night. In the summer I think the dough would end up tasting pretty beery, because it gets really hot in here and the yeasts would go crazy in the heat for that long.

What did people do in the dark ages before they had instant yeast and refrigerators? Well, they woke up at 4 in the morning to catch the dough at the right stage of development, and they fiddled around with sourdough cultures which would get contaminated from time to time and wreck the bread, and pretty much had to make a profession of it for it to be worthwhile. Baker is not a noble family name, but it is a respectable one, I think.

Yay Baguette Pan!

  
I found a baguette pan at goodwill! I saw one about 2 years ago, and had been kicking myself ever since for not buying it. But now I have one, and in my excitement, I had to go look up some recipes for baguette making. I used the smaller formula found here, but I didn't really follow the procedure exactly. Here's what I did:

 for the pre-ferment

100g bread flour
100g water
1/2 teaspoon instant yeast

Mix these things together until they are pretty smooth. Cover loosely, and allow to sit at room temperature for 2 to 4 hours. Then either stick it in the fridge until you want to use it, (for me, that was from Friday night until Sunday morning) or start making the bread with it right away.

In either case, add

325g bread flour
155g water
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon instant yeast

Knead until it's pretty smooth, around 10 minutes, then cover and allow it to rest for 40 min. Fold the dough over on itself 3-4 times, let rest another 40. Do the folds again, and another half hour rest.

After the final rest, gently shape the dough out into a log about 14" long. Cut it in half along the long axis (I used a chef's knife). This will give you 2 long skinny ropes of dough. Pinch the cut edges closed on each one.

Lightly oil the pan, and place each rope of dough in one of the depressions, with the pinched parts facing down.. Cover with a towel and let it rest 10 or 15 minutes.

Brush each baguette with a little water, then slash the tops with a knife.

Bake at 450 for 15 min, then turn the pan and reduce the heat to 375. Bake another 15 minutes.

notes-

1. Measuring ingredients by weight helps a lot. Water is the same size all the time, so you can measure it by volume if you like, but because flour is a compressible powder, a cup of it can contain vastly different actual amounts of stuff. Measuring with a scale eliminates the problem, because a pound of flour is always a pound of flour, no matter how much room it takes up.
2. I used a bread machine. I just set it on the knead cycle for 10 minutes, then took the dough out and put it in a bowl for the resting & folding parts.
3. Today it's pretty cool in my house. I did the rising in the oven, with a kettle of boiled water next to the dough to keep it warm.
4. You shouldn't need to add any more flour for the folding part, and only the lightest dusting on the board for the shaping. Adding a bunch more flour will make the bread heavy and dry.
5. The amount of time it takes to pre-heat my oven is about the right amount of time for the final resting of the dough in the pans. I have an electric oven, so it takes a while.
6. Don't be afraid to really slash the loaves! I did not do mine quite deeply enough, and as a consequence, the loaves split longitudinally, rather than having those picturesque eyes open in the tops.

Man these are great. They also are a giant leap forward in my bread making skills. The pan helps, but I think mostly the procedure is what matters.

There are a couple things about this recipe that seem to be important. One is probably salt. This calls for almost twice what I usually put in my bread. Salt does something to the way yeast metabolizes the flour, but I'm afraid I don't know exactly what. Obviously it also affects taste: this is a very savory loaf, deliciously so.

The other thing is the pre-fermentation of a portion of the dough. Longer rising will times let the yeasts develop more 'bready' rather than 'doughy' flavors in the finished loaf, but letting it go too long will make the dough have a strong alcoholic whiff. That fades quickly, but it still isn't what I want. Rising time also affects texture- long rising gives the best breads a chewy texture, but has a tendency to make them dense and rubbery also. Short rising gives bread a lighter, more delicate texture, but will impart less flavor. The compromise is to pre-ferment only part of the dough. Outcome? Crusty, yet tender,chewy but light, complex taste and freshness together.

Now, how could I have gone and failed to provide myself with some nice runny cheese to go with this? Foolishness! On the other hand, if I had, I would never have realized that a slice of cheddar with a couple nasturtium leaves is a lot like cream cheese and watercress, but with more oomph.