I am, if nothing else, a fan of baguettes. I could, and have nearly, live off them with only cheese and olive oil. For the past few months I’ve been making my own baguettes from this recipe, but as I was binging youtube the other day I found this video by Patrick Ryan. Between his Irish accent and how good his baguettes turned out, I figured I had to try it.
His recipe begins three days before you actually get to eat the baguettes, which for a totally patient person like me, didn’t seem bad at all….
I started the first dough on a Thursday, added the second dough on Friday and after ten minutes of kneading, I let it chill out in the fridge for another 24 hours.
Saturday morning was the morning all my dreams were gonna come true. I shaped the dough, following the video as closely as I could.
The only real problem I ran into was that my dough was pretty cold from the fridge and seemed to take forever to come down to a workable temp. After a lot of shaping and waiting, I finally had them in their little flour and tea towel bed, ready for their final hour long nap. After this last rise and I began steaming and preheating the oven. I put a baking dish of water on the lower rack, and then added more boiling water right before they went in. I also put the baking sheet I was going to use in the oven so the baguettes would start baking as soon as they hit the sheet.
Right before popping three in the oven, I scored them with a razor and then sprayed them with a water bottle, just to make sure that the crust would develop.
They really didn’t take long to bake, and after three days, I had the most gorgeous, crunchy and crackly but pillowy-soft on the inside, french bread. My heart was full of love and my stomach was full of the first baguette that came out of the oven.
Despite being more work than I’ve ever put into french bread, I can definitely see this becoming a part of my weekly routine so that I always have fresh baked bread on hand.
Lauren Attempts to Bake 