French Baguette

’ve never made a french baguette before. I always buy them because I love french breads, I love the crust on the outside and the soft interior, one of my favorite breads.

But how I’m always up for a baking challenge, I wanted to try and make it myself. I mean, bread is bread, right? You make one bread you can make all sorts of breads. This bread is similar to making the artisan bread in the sense that the dough ingredients are the same, just different quantities.

The ingredients in french baguette are very simple, flour, salt, yeast and water. The only thing I changed on this recipe, is the flour, I used bread flour instead. I wanted to experiment with it, and see what the difference in the bread will be. The main difference between bread flour and all purpose flour is that bread flour has a higher level of protein which will make the dough have more gluten, and the gluten is what gives the dough springiness.

I’m not an expert on this, but I happened to have bread flour on hand so why not use it and see what happens. Basically if you use bread flour, you will get a chewier but stronger dough.

To start this process, you’ll need a big bowl, into which you add the water, the yeast and half the flour. You can use a wooden spoon to mix all this together, it will be a very wet and sticky dough, but I always go in there with my hands to make sure it’s all mixed well.

Cover this gooey dough with a clean towel, and keep it in a warm place for a couple hours. After a couple hours the dough should look like this:

I mixed the remaining two cups of flour with the salt and added it to the gooey dough. Mix it well and you have to knead the dough for about 10 minutes. Now I’m sure you can do this in your mixer and probably get better results, but I wanted to do it by hand, so I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes. The dough will be a bit sticky but that’s how it should be. In a clean bowl, add a bit of oil and place the dough in the oiled bowl, rubbing oil over the entire dough first.

Cover the dough with a clean kitchen towel again and let it rise until it doubles in size, about 1 to 2 hours. After two hours it should look like this:

Lightly flour your work surface and knead the dough for another 5 minutes then cut the dough into 3 equal pieces. You can also cut it into 4 and make shorter baguettes, which probably would have worked out better for me because I don’t have really long baking pans, so I had to bake one baguette at a time. After you cut the dough, let it rest for a few more minutes, about 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, shape each piece of dough into a baguette. Now there are many techniques used to shape baguettes, but I just plainly rolled them. You can find lots of videos on youtube on how to shape baguettes, if interested.

Place the baguettes on a clean kitchen towel and let them rest for another 15 minutes. While the baguettes are resting, preheat the oven to 450 F degrees.

On the baking sheet or baking stone, you can either sprinkle some flour or cornmeal, I’m not a big fan of cornmeal on my bread so I just sprinkled some flour. Using a sharp knife, cut long lines going across the baguettes. Before placing them in the oven, fill a baking dish with a couple cups of water and place it on the bottom rack This will ensure the bread will get that crusty top. Bake the bread in the oven for about 12 to 15 minutes and you’re done.

Now I don’t know if it was because of the flour or something else, but the bread seems whiter to me and oh boy it’s so good. I hope you give it a try and let me know how it goes.