MAKE FRENCH BAGUETTES AT HOME | Baguette Recipe for the Home Baker

hey what's up everyone deserves to know what a really great fresh baguette right out of the oven tastes like today I'm gonna show you how to make one [Music] let's be totally honest outside of France the word baguette is used very loosely and I'm not here to police and call people a lot of fake baguettes but to me a bag that means one very specific thing we're talking about flour water salt and yeast that's fermented to make something that's cracker e toasty creamy and tender all at the same time in my mind the place to start when you're talking about a really great baguette is how we ferment it our baguette is going to be paying tribute to a classic style pre ferment which is called a Jewish a poolish is basically this flour and water that we mixed together ahead of time with a little bit of yeast and we let it ripen on the countertop overnight before we mix that into our final bread dough for our Polish we're gonna mix together 150 grams of bread flour and 150 grams of room-temperature water so that we're gonna add a very small pinch of yeast once all that stirred up to combine we're gonna let it sit on the countertop overnight for about 12 to 16 hours the next morning when we come back our polish smells really sweet it's very yeasty and it's all boozy and full of gas in my mind making a Polish is the ideal way to build a ton of flavor and complexity into a yeasted dough without over fermenting it or making it tired and sluggish now we're gonna move into the beginning part of our mixer so grab your stand mixer or a stainless steel bowl if you're doing this by hand which is entirely possible by the way into that bowl we're gonna measure 240 grams of warm water all of the right polish that we ripen to overnight and 400 grams of bread flour AP flour will definitely work here too if that's all you have but I like bread flour here for you guys at home mainly because it makes the shaping part of this bag and a little bit easier later on we're gonna start by mixing this on low speed just until things are well combined at this point we're gonna move this dough into a quick 20 minute Auto lease to slowly hydrate this flour for a quick refresher on what Otto Lee's is and why we do it check out the sourdough tips video from a few weeks back I'll link to that down below once everything is combined we're gonna cover the bowl with a tea towel just to keep things from drying out we're gonna let that hang out and on at least for about 20 minutes and after that we're gonna come back and add two grams of yeast and 10 grams of malt powder we're gonna start mixing on low to get that combined and hydrated before we add our salt mul powder is not a hundred percent necessary but it does go a long way in replicating a pro-level baguette this is just one of the small adjustments I've made to this formula to make it a little bit more friendly to the home baker most professional bread bakeries have access to a flower called malted flour this just means that a very small percentage of the flour is supplemented with malted or sprouted barley flour adding multiplier increases it's ferment ability but it also gives our crust that distinctive brittle shiny almost dark red crust that we really want in a harsh style bread especially a baguette I got this stuff for like seven bucks on Amazon so it's kind of like my bee man's home bread hack 2020 Edition once our yeast and Mulder is welcomed by and we're gonna add in 11 grams of salt I'm gonna continue to mix this on medium low speed for about 2 minutes at that point I'm going to turn up my mixer to about medium-high and knead for an additional two to three minutes or until the dough clears the bowl and starts to slap the sides a little bit so there's a real art and science to mixing dough out there for sure but small batch home dough mixing is just a matter of making it strong enough so give it a hard time in the bowl to get there maybe about four minutes total at that point we're gonna wrap it up with plastic wrap and we're gonna set a 30-minute timer after that thirty minutes we're gonna give this door one strength-building fold I like to stretch the dough out till I feel real tension and then just fold it back over itself after five to six of those folds we're gonna grab this whole massive dough and kind of just fold it up under itself to create a nice taut shiny top at this point the dough should be plenty strong for a baguette but if you're doing this by hand you might want to add a second fold at the 60 minute mark just to make sure that it's getting all the way strong mine's feeling good so I'm gonna move on we're gonna set a two hour timer well let those fermenting I'm gonna mention that for real baguettes at home you probably need a lame a lame is just the term we use for a fancy razor blade holder that bakers used to cut slits in the bread for these bad gets to open properly and get the look and texture of a real baguette we need uniformed slanted cuts that go pretty deep into the dough owing to this one down below if you're interested this one came with a leather blade cover which is very helpful for safety as these are super sharp so stay frosty with these things okay so it's been two hours in our dough is roughly doubled in size it looks alive and is pre gaseous I'm gonna flip this dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and I'm gonna divide it into four 225 grams pieces I turned this into a four piece recipe just so you could have some extra baguettes to either share with friends or even freeze them I figure any time you're gonna go through the trouble of making and fermenting something it might as well be a big batch so that future you can benefit from your hard work now once we've got our dough cut into four 225 grams sized pieces we're gonna gently turn them into little tot rounds this is called pre shaping we do this mainly to give ourselves uniform pieces of dough to start shaping with the move here is to use your left hand with the dough scraper to push the dough and your right hand to kind of pull it back towards you and tuck it under you don't want to go too crazy getting these too strong and tight the dough's pretty dry and doesn't need a lot of help we're just looking for a nice simple round shape once we got these pre shaped we're gonna let these stand here and rest for 20 minutes under a tea towel after 20 minutes rest time we're gonna come back to shape these baguettes to properly proof a shaped baguette you're gonna need a little piece of fabric called a Koosh this is a pretty rustic canvas cloth that we use to separate and support the little torpedoes of dough once we've shaped them if you want the real-deal baguettes set up at home I definitely recommend grabbing one of these off Amazon I think this one was like 12 bucks and it's very similar to what we would use in the bakery so the real challenge of making a great baguette is in this step the shaping step okay to start we're gonna clear the work surface off by flipping the other three dough balls into a lightly floured surface out of the way once you got your single dough ball we're gonna lightly flour the top and flip it on to that side so that the bottom is facing up this way we're just gonna gently degassed it and push it into a general rectangle shape starting from the top I'm gonna use the tips of my fingers to press and roll this dough over up and into itself each time I roll it on pressing it down and pinching it forward just to seal it up now we're gonna be rolling this tube that we've made back and forth putting pressure in the seam with our thumbs when we push forward and pressure with our fingertips when we pull it back towards us this rolling hand triangle move is how we stretch these out into a baguette shape is we get these stretched out more and more we use a little bit more pressure on the ends to taper it off that's how we get those signature points on the baguette be sure to keep this seam side down and use a little bit of pressure from our finger tips and thumbs when we're rolling this back and forth once we've shaped our baguette to roughly 12 inches in length we're gonna transfer this over to our floured Koosh the dough needs to be supported on both sides in two that we're gonna be pulling the canvas up with a little bit of slack creating a little bit of hill on either side that acts as a barrier from the other baguettes and also as a support [Music] we're gonna shape up the rest of these baguettes and we're gonna Koosh um up just as I described before to proof these we're gonna fold the linen over itself just to wrap the whole thing up make sure the sides are flipped over enough to create a little bit of support and tension on the outside baguettes almost if there was an ghost baguette out there holding it up once we wrapped up we're gonna let those proof on the counter for about 45 minutes at this point I'm gonna preheat my oven to 550 and put my baking stone in there to preheat this might seem like a really high temperature but home ovens aren't very powerful so we're overshooting on temp a little bit just to help replicate the thermal mass of a deck oven at a pro bakery so after 45 minutes our baguettes have risen quite a bit when I poke them with my finger you can see an indent but that indent kind of pops back that lets me know they're kind of at that perfect sweet spot of proofed so to make these baguettes we're gonna pull out our baking stone and put it on something that can handle the heat I've got a metal rack here I'm gonna give the stone some semolina flour to prevent sticking and then I'm going to transfer these baguettes over using what I call a flip board this is basically just a sturdy piece of cardboard from a box in my basement but anything the length of a baguette that's kind of sturdy and flat will do and then slide it on to the stone we're gonna repeat this for both baguettes once I've got these on the stone we need to arrange them a little bit just so we can make sure they fit under the lid once we're all situated we're gonna grab our lame and make three to four very deliberate diagonal slices on an angle and after we scored properly we're gonna grab a lid mine is a stainless steel bowl this cover is necessary to trap all the steam we need to get these baguettes to spring properly in the oven once I've got this stone covered I'm gonna load the whole thing into the oven and turn it down to 485 degrees I'm gonna bake this for 10 minutes with the bowl as a cover during this time the baguettes are gonna spring and rise and after that 10 minutes we're gonna carefully remove the bowl and finish baking these on 485 for an additional 8 to 10 minutes I usually go the full 10 minutes because I like my baguettes quite dark you know they're done when the outside begins to have a dark tan almost reddish quality to it when it's got that good dark color and it feels hollow on the inside we're gonna pull it from the oven and let it cool for about ten minutes the only bread I eat hot is usually a bad gas we worked really hard for that brittle crispy crust by making a foolish using mount powder and fermenting this whole thing very carefully so it's never gonna be better than after that first ten minutes so grab some fresh grassy salty butter smear it all over and let's eat some [Music] choice T yeah so that's a classic French baguette at home there's a few special moves here both a little bit of practice you can totally do it it's totally worth it I had a ton of fun breaking this down for you guys today if you have any questions leave them in the comments down below I will help you guys out the best that I can as always thank you guys so much for your time and attention thanks for sticking around and we'll see you next time

Channel: Brian Lagerstrom

Views: 593,431

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Id: eQLTJLF89A4

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020