A nice baguette
For once a very non-technical post.
When I was a kid, I sometimes asked my mum why, if she could bake her regular bread, she couldn’t sometimes make a nice baguette with a a good crumb and a chewy inside. She was convinced it was impossible to achieve with a regular home oven. I’m happy to say she was wrong.
You need a convection oven that can reach 230 °C, a pizza stone that fits in the oven, and a source of water vapor to ensure the recognizable crust. Note that there’s no approved way to make this bread gluten free: The quality of the resulting bread is directly dependent on a decent amount of wheat protein.
This is a recipe I found in a newspaper a good while back - I’m sorry I can’t provide proper credit - and which has served me well for several years. This yields three small baguettes, each measuring around 30 cm in length, which should be enough for a nice, relaxing breakfast for 4-6 people. There’s nearly no work involved, but the bread should be allowed to rise for at least some eight hours, so start the dough in the evening, and let your partner wake up to the smell of freshly baked bread in the morning.
Ingredients
- 450 g wheat flour
- 300 g cool water
- 12 g salt
- 3 g yeast
Process
Evening preparation
Start by measuring up the water into a large bowl. Add the yeast and mix thoroughly. Once the water is grey from the yeast, add first the flour, then the salt on top of the flour. Mix until all flour has been incorporated in a rough, gooey ball of dough.
Cover the bowl with clingwrap to create a protective atmosphere, and a kitchen towel to keep the light out. Or if you want to go old-school you could use a moist kitchen towel only.
Let the dough rest for some 8 hours.
Baking the bread
Put a pizza stone on an oven rack about half-way up in the oven. Fill a stoneware pie form to 3/4 with water and put it on a baking tray near the bottom of the oven - never on the actual bottom, though! Set the temperature to 230 °C and turn on convection heating.
Powder a surface with a decent amount of flour - the dough will be pretty wet at this point - and use a spatula to extract the dough from its bowl. Pull the dough into a roughly square shape, and fold it from each side toward the middle; first top and bottom, then left and right. Flip the resulting package of dough so the seam ends up on the powdered surface, and cover it with a kitchen towel for 45 minutes, allowing it to rise a second time while the pizza stone heats up properly.
After the second rising, cut the dough into three pieces of approximately equal size. Twist each piece until it looks like a baguette screw, then use a very sharp knife to make diagonal cuts a couple of centimeters into the dough. Use a well-floured pizza spatula to transfer the baguettes into the oven, and let them bake for 20 minutes. The bread should be lightly brown, give off a hollow sound when tapped with your finger, and have a lovely crunchy sound when twisted or broken.