My First Ever Baguette

Today was my very first attempt at the elusive baguette and apart from letting them over-prove in pre-shaping stage, bad shaping and bad scoring they turned out OK.  They wouldn’t win any contest but I would love to to buy a baguette like this around here and I can’t…best I keep on practicing then.  Not being an expert it’s difficult to tell you how to make one properly but I can tell you what I did wrong in order to help anyone wanting a go.

I made them while looking after 3 year old who chose not to understand the importance of paying attention to the dough before it  starts to over-proved to shape.  My 3 year old refuses to accept there’s something even more demanding than her and so the battle between dealing with dough and 3 year old took place…the 3 year old won…she has scream-ability you know.

A month ago I spent a whole weekend watching youtube clips on folding, shaping and scoring baguettes.  I wouldn’t have achieved the half decent attempt today had I not watched them.  Unfortunately I didn’t watch it last night to refresh my mind and avoid mistakes but no matter it’s all a learning process.  Here’s one of the best I’ve seen for shaping by Jeffrey Hamelman here, and the other one for shaping by Ciril Hitz here, who also goes through the process of dividing up the dough and pre-shaping in detail.  Watch this one for scoring here, I never thought the scoring is done overlapping and straight.  I can’t stress enough how good and informative they are.

I would also advise strongly to watch this evaluation clip by Jeffrey Hamelman here, because he talks in great detail what it is you are looking for in a baguette.  Jeffrey talks from a competition point of view but he also said one of the most insightful things when pointing out the edge of the crumb.  In pointing to how closed the crumb is around the edge he said you can tell if the baker has put too much pressure when pressing the palm of his hand to close the edge of the baguette before rolling it out.  Watching the video of this step you think the baker is pressing quite firmly but when listening to Jeffrey’s evaluation you realise he shouldn’t be pressing hard.  This is the sort of small detail that is so valuable coming from a professional.

I followed Tartine’s recipe which uses half sourdough and half yeast.  He starts a poolish of yeast the night before and then the next day it’s pretty easy to follow if you’re use to making a sourdough folding method.  When it came to the shaping I followed the youtube clips.

Where it went wrong for me was letting the pre-shapes over-prove, they became too gassy.  The consequences of this was making the dough hard to roll and shape into the long baton shapes.  The dough had the tendency to want to spring back forcing me to use too much force.  The result from using too much force is a lot of my crumb is not like the photo above, it’s a tighter crumb, I obviously pressed too much gas out of the dough doing that.  It’s better not to let them rest after pre-shaping them just go ahead with the rolling.

Once you’ve shape them I found transferring them to the linen cloth a bit tricky but best done with confidence and speed.  I used my late Gran’s hand-made linen cloth made by her own hands, the farmer Gran who use to bake broa in her wood oven.

For dusting I used flour and semolina and found the combination really good.

For the scoring I didn’t have a proper blade, which should be the curved type as seen on the youtube clip to give you the little ‘ear’ effect.  I used a small serrated knife and didn’t cut deep enough.

What I was please with given the limitation with a domestic oven was the good crust I had.  This was in part because of the really good steam I give prior to baking see my Walnut Loaf  for details, and partly because of the flour I used.  A baguette crust shouldn’t be thick but at the same time it should be really crisp and shatter when you bite into it.

Last week after experimenting with a particular flour from Shipton Mill, a British flour in fact specially selected for bread, I tasted for the first time what a difference a special flour can make to the taste of the crust as well as an incredible satisfying crunch, much more so than the standard supermarket bread flour I’ve been using.  It really pays for a special loaf to put your trust in a good miller.

For these baguettes the recipe asks for two flours, one an All Purpose flour, I used French T55 bought from Shipton Mill and it also asks for bread flour, I used Shipton’s Organic Strong flour.

Next time apart from improving the shaping and scoring and not letting it over-prove prior to shaping I would bake these at a higher temperature of 220C fan (these were baked at 200C fan) and see if getting them slightly darker would give me the crust I’m after.  As I’ve said I’m very happy with the crust here but the very ends where they’re darker there’s a slight caramel taste to the crust and I’m going to see if I can achieve more of that to the overall crust.

Just in case you’re wondering I baked these on baking parchment on top of a very large baking metal tray which comes with my oven as shown in the photo in my Walnut Loaf post.  For the last 10 minutes of baking I removed them from the tray and placed direct on oven shelf.

This baguette is made with yeast and sourdough.  I would like to make it a higher proportion of sourdough to yeast…play around with it..maybe even retarding it once shaped in the fridge for a stronger flavour.

I’ve made batons using 100% sourdough but they don’t give the right results for a baguette.  No.  Not from a texture point of view.  Now I love 100% baguette style shapes because of the strong taste and I’m very happy with the chewier crumb but for most people that’s not what they want in baguette crumb.  The crumb should be light.  I’ve seen 100% baguettes trying to achieve this by producing a crumb that is so full of holes there is virtually no crumb to put your butter on, this for my husband is a silly thing.  A baker friend described those baguettes as being more a ciabatta than a baguette and he has a point.  If you change the characteristics of a baguette to the point it appears to be a different style of bread altogether then you enter murky waters.

I don’t like a full-on yeast baguettes, it does nothing for me.  Having tasted all three variations, yeast, sourdough and a hybrid I’ve come to the conclusion the hybrid is the answer to deliver taste and texture in a baguette to those like me and those like my family.