Recipes

A series of vacations spent in France has left me with a fascination with baguette. Unfortunately, good baguette is completely unobtainable where I live. So at some point, I resolved to learn to bake it myself.

A quick decade or two later, I have a recipe that is probably not perfect. But it works reliably, and yields bread that is good enough for us.

It goes like this. The recipe yields six baguettes. The dough will proof for a total of 48 hours before baking. So if you want baguette on Sunday morning, make your dough on Friday morning.

OK, so on Friday morning:
1. Put 1kg of flour in a dough bowl. We use German Type 550. There's probably better flour somewhere out there, but this is cheap and readily available.
2. Throw in a few crumbs of yeast (ca. 3 grams). Mix.
3. Weigh 620 grams of cold water.
4. Add 20 grams of salt to the water. Stir.
6. Mix the salt water in the dough. In the kitchen machine, knead for 2-3 minutes, until the dough comes together.
7. Put the dough in an airtight box, and store in the fridge for ca. 36 hours.

Good. Now we wait.

On Saturday evening:
1. Put some flour on your work table, get the dough from the fridge.
2. Divide the flour into six pieces of identical weight. It's ok to eyeball the size, just try to keep them similar, ok?
3. Shape each piece into a baguette. Do this by pulling first one end towards the middle, then the other. Repeat over and over, and you'll see that the loaf takes on the desired shape.
4. Cover a baking sheet with a towel. Put flour on the towel. Put the loaves on the towel. Between the loaves, pull up a fold from the towel, so that the fold keeps the loaves separate.
5. Cover the loaves with another towel. Put the whole sheet in the fridge until the next morning.

Sunday morning. Rise and shine!
1. Preheat your oven as high as you can. 250C should be doable in most ovens. Go higher if you can. If you have a pizza stone, use it.
2. Once the oven is hot, score the top of the loaves with a sharp knife. Then put them in the oven, and spray them with water.
3. Bake for ca. 12 minutes, until the loaves are a nice golden brown.
4. Repeat for the next three loaves.
5. Let cool a bit. Then enjoy!