Bread Recipes Baguette

Magazine. He is a breadhead who has, for more than 10 years, been teaching baking and pizza online and at places like King Arthur Baking Company and Maine's Kneading Conference.

At some point in every amateur bread baker’s life comes the desire to tackle the baguette, and for good reason: Great baguettes are hard to come by outside of France. The name baguette means “wand” or “stick, ” referring to its long, slender shape. The bread is a relatively modern invention, first arising in the late-nineteenth century and achieving its familiar form and character around 1920. Despite its relatively young age, it didn't take long for the baguette to become a significant symbol of French culture, which was recently recognized by UNESCO when it added the baguette ot its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

With a dull flavor, soft crust, and a cottony, dense interior, supermarket baguettes (laden with chemicals to prevent staling) are terrible, insulting facsimiles of les vrais choses, or the real things. And even those baguettes made in top-notch bakeries—should you have one nearby—lose their magic within a few hours after baking, never to be recovered.

Gluten Free Sourdough Baguette (french Bread)

That’s because baguettes are inescapably ephemeral things. Unlike most other breads, they are more crust than crumb, and as such, exceedingly quick to stale. Other high-crust ratio breads like rolls contain fats or other ingredients to help stave off staling, but a real baguette should be made from nothing other than flour, water, yeast, and salt. A well-made one is at its peak minutes after it leaves the oven and begins to degrade soon thereafter. Which means that—unless you have a bakery nearby that bakes them regularly throughout the day—it makes more sense to bake them at home. 

Breads for the home baker to learn to make, mostly thanks to the many complicated shaping steps involved. Practice makes perfect in all things, especially when it comes to baguettes, and it's hard for a home baker to notch enough of them for the skill to become second nature. My best advice to anyone wanting to nail the baguette? Land a job at a bakery and make several hundred of them a week for a few years. Barring that, find a good recipe and just

I speak from experience here: I've been trying to perfect my baguette for years now, and I continue to fail more often than I succeed. Nevertheless, I

Delicious And Easy Baguette Recipe

Think it's worth the effort, and I encourage you to give it a go. Your failures, like mine, will be mostly aesthetic in nature and delicious, despite outward imperfections. And if you are like me, you'll find the challenge a source of fun rather than frustration.

If all that hasn’t scared the idea of baguette-making out of you entirely, good news: I have a recipe for you to work with. It's one I’ve refined over many years and designed to be as simple as possible while still capable of making a superlative baguette.

Like I said, a real baguette contains nothing more than flour, water, yeast, and salt. Here’s what goes into my formula, and why:

Crusty French Baguette Recipe

High-protein all-purpose flour: Most French baguettes are made with a medium-protein flour (11 to 12%) for the proper crisp, yet tender texture. This percentage straddles the line between most American all-purpose flours and bread flours, but King Arthur all-purpose flour (the one in the red bag), with its higher-than-normal 11.7% protein, actually makes an excellent baguette flour. If you can't find that one for some reason, use bread flour instead.

Sifted whole wheat flour: In France, refined white flours contain more bran and germ than do American ones, which gives their loaves a golden-hued crumb and a wheatier, more complex flavor. Adding 5% whole wheat flour—sifted through a standard fine-mesh strainer to remove most of the larger particles of gluten-degrading bran it contains—to the all-purpose flour gives the baguette a similar flavor and appearance.

Diastatic malt powder: Not to be confused with malt sugar, non-diastatic malt powder, malt syrup, or malted milk powder (all of which are sugars)

Grain Free French Bread

Is an enzyme made from malted barley or wheat, that breaks down starches into simple sugars. It is naturally present in grains and used by the just-sprouted plant to access the energy stored up in its core. In flour, diastatic malt serves to provide a steady supply of sugar, to drive fermentation during proofing and caramelization in the heat of the oven. 

Diastatic malt is usually added to commercial flours in the mill—it's often listed as “malted barley” or “barley flour in the ingredients—in order to ensure a uniform, consistent amount from bag to bag. Adding a little

Diastatic malt to long-fermented doughs like this baguette ensures that there will always be enough sugar around to achieve dramatic browning during baking. 

French Bread Recipe

Diastatic malt powder is a specialty item only available at baking supply stores or online. If you don’t have any yet, I’ve made it optional in the formula so you can just leave it out for now, it won’t make or break your baguettes.

Water: Baguettes, with their tender and open internal crumb, require a relatively high hydration (a high ratio of water to flour by weight). My formula has a hydration of 73%  (this falls in line with other rustic breads like sourdough), which is as high as possible, yielding a dough that is not sticky or hard to handle. 

Yeast: Compared to other bread formulas, this recipe contains a relatively small amount of yeast. That's because it gets a long, cold fermentation in the fridge, rather than a quick room-temperature one. Dialing down the yeast and slowing down the proof encourages the production of more of the aromatic side-products of dough fermentation—acids, alcohols, esters, and other organic molecules—to develop complex flavor. 

The Best Gluten Free Baguettes

Way baguettes differ from most other breads is the sheer number of tools they require. A few of these are things you probably have on hand or can get easily; others are specialty items you'll need to seek out.

Rectangular cake pan: When professional bakers make baguettes, they begin by dividing a massive amount of dough into many rectangular baguette-sized portions, a relatively easy thing to do when working with a huge mass of dough (plus having  smaller portions makes it far easier to coax the dough into a uniform cylinder without overworking or degassing it). To achieve a similar effect at home, I cold-proof the dough in a rectangular 13- by 9-inch cake pan. The dough spreads out into a rectangle as it sits in the fridge, making it easy to divide into four more-or-less uniform pieces when it is turned out of the pan and onto a floured countertop later on.

Couche: To maintain their uniform cylindrical shape and to prevent them from touching one another, the shaped baguettes need to proof within the folds of a floured linen cloth known in French as a couche. Coarse, heavy linen is the fabric of choice for couches because it has enough heft to stay upright when pleated, and the right sort of texture to wick moisture away from the dough without also attaching itself to it. The ideal dimensions of a home-scale couche are 17 inches wide and at least 20 inches long. I prefer the 18-inch wide couches from the San Francisco Baking Institute, because they are sized to fit a half-sheet. You could make your own couche if you can find a bolt of the right grade of linen, but pre-cut ones with hemmed edges that won’t fray aren’t all that more expensive than DIY versions. If you don’t want to invest in a couche just yet, the next best option is a large linen tea towel.

Fabulous French Bread

Clean plastic garbage bag: To keep the dough from drying out as they rest or proof, bakeries keep them inside covered rolling racks. At home, you can use clean plastic garbage bags instead. 

Transfer peel: Once the baguettes are proofed, they are too floppy and fragile to move to a baking peel. Instead, you want to use a thin, stiff, beveled-edge wooden board known as a transfer peel. To use one, you use the transfer peel to roll a baguette over on the couche, use the couche to roll the baguette onto the transfer peel, then roll the baguette off of the transfer peel onto a sheet of parchment and use the peel to fine-tune its position, if needed. At first, all the flipping and flopping might seem like overkill, but in truth it is the gentlest and most effective way to move a baguette from one place to another. (It’s also why a transfer peel is sometimes known as a “flipper board.”) Again, a transfer peel is definitely something a handy person could fashion themselves, but commercial ones are inexpensive. They are a specialty item you’ll most likely need to order online.

To score breads. For baguettes, you ideally want to use a curved-blade lame rather than a straight one, because the former is easier to orient at an extreme angle to the dough, which in turn helps to cut a flap of dough that will form a dramatic ear once the loaf is baked.

Easy French Baguette Bread