How to Make Baguettes

we're going to make baguettes today the recipe I'm using comes straight out of the book how to make bread by Emanuel Andrea one of the many great recipes in his book the instructions are pretty straightforward it starts with mixing up a pre ferment called a poolish the night before and then continuing in the morning making a poolish couldn't be simpler in this case we're adding a gram of instant yeast to 125 grams of all-purpose flour and then mixing that into 125 grams of warm water you'll find all the ingredients and measurements on our website so you don't have to make note of them now and this will sit covered overnight this is the poolish that I prepared last night it's bubbly has a wonderful yeasty aroma and it's ready to go let me see if I can get it closed up for you to the poolish we add 140 grams of warm water then the dry ingredients which consists of 300 grams of all-purpose flour 5 grams of salt and a gram of instant yeast and we're going to mix this just until the flour is incorporated until all the ingredients come together now we have kind of a rough ball of dough but we're just going to let that sit in the bowl for ten minutes covered and then come back in ten minutes I'll show you what we do next now you're going to do a series of brief meetings that are more like stretching folds each one should only take about ten seconds the instructions call for this to be done a total of four times and 10-minute intervals about the end of which you'll have a nice smooth ball of dough and you cover it between each kneading if you wet your fingers a little bit the dough won't stick when you're kneading this is the fourth time doing this and the dough is indeed nice and smooth now now we're just going to let it sit here and proof covered for one hour all right it's been an hour we're going to punch down the dough and weigh it weighs 689 grams divided by three so we want each piece to be 230 grams so we're going to divide this into three even pieces that's 230 that's 230 so this should be 230 228 close enough all right now we need to flour the board a little bit and we're going to flatten these out gently and do an oval kind of an oval shape and stretch the ends and fold towards the middle and then you're going to take the top edge of this piece and fold it towards the the middle about 1/3 flip it 180 turn it 180 and do the same thing on the other side fold the top edge towards the middle turn it 180 do the same thing on the other edge now hopefully you have three uniform oblong loaves that you're going to let rest seam side down for 15 minutes these two look pretty good this one's not quite the same shape but now it is sort of and I'm going to cover that with a damp towel so they don't dry out while they're resting okay 15 minutes rest time and after the 15 minute rest period we're going to take one of the loaves turn it over flatten slightly and starting at one corner fold 1/3 of the way towards the middle and move to the other end do the same thing and then going back to the other side fold the other the last portion over so it's all rolled up and then just roll it out like this to form your desired to get till you get the desired length could be a little tricky getting just the right uniformity you're after that's pretty close flattened slightly starting at one corner fold one third of the way over go to the end there and one third then finish folding it over and roll it out now you're going to place them on your flowered couch or baking linen cover and let them rise until they're about double in size it's about one hour now the fun part scoring and baking a couple of ways you can do this is to transfer the loaves to a baguette pan like this score the loaves and go straight into your preheated oven or if you're using a baking stone you can transfer them onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet which slides easily onto the stone and that's what I'm going to do now I'll use this baguette flipping board to transfer the dough onto the cookie sheet for scoring use a long or a super-sharp blade scoring can be a bit tricky you want about 5 1/4 inch deep cuts down the middle overlapping by 1/3 and the blade held at about a 45-degree angle and you need to move kind of fast so you get a clean cut and don't tear the dough I think you need to do this several hundred times to get the feel for it it's awesome to watch a real pro do it most of the time I don't get it right and what I do it's pure luck and into the 475 degree oven for about 15 minutes or until golden brown I'll pour about a half a cup of water into a hot pan to produce some steam all right it's been about 17 minutes definitely look like they're done and they sound like they're done they're done now we'll let them cool for about an hour let's see if we can pick up some of that wonderful crackling noise did bread mix while it's cooling all right let's take a look at the inside all right well these look pretty good the crumb which is the inside part of the bread on a baguette it is supposed to be characterized by lots of random size holes with none of them too big this particular loaf could have more of the larger holes for that I could experiment with increasing the hydration level of the dough somewhat next time tweaking things like hydration levels proofing times and dough handling can make striving for bed perfection something of an obsession I probably made this recipe about 6 to 8 times and these loaves are pretty typical of the results I get sometimes they look a little better sometimes are not so great but everyone has delivered an excellent baguette eating experience with a crispy crackly crust and a soft creamy crumb so if you like baguettes give these a try thanks for watching you I hope you enjoyed the video one last note baguettes are best enjoyed within a few hours of baking so planned your baking schedule with that in mind have fun with it and please share your results

Channel: Breadtopia

Views: 559,167

Keywords: baguette, Bread (Food), baking, Food (TV Genre)

Id: -9DrwXYCICg

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 01 2015