Baguettes

Yesterday, while stumbling my way around this silly, empty internet thing, I ran across a really great website about bread. I wish I could link to it, but I apparently forgot to bookmark it :( Anyways, while reading about a hundred things I had never considered in my baking before (like dough temperature, and hard water affecting the bread, for example), the craving for a nice French baguette struck me. I started thinking about goat cheese, and bruschetta, and that delicate crackling sound of the cooling crust.

So in response to that craving, today I made two of the most splendidly awful looking pair of baguettes I've ever seen. The chewy texture and complex, salty flavor were spot on, though. The crust was delightfully crispy, but not as golden and crackly as I could have hoped. The recipe I followed called for a "moist, sticky dough" and a total of almost 4 hours of rising/proofing time. So I'm not much surprised that I ended up with loose, flat, over-proofed baguettes, rather than the round, slender beauties I had imagined. These actually reminded me more of ciabatta bread, with the flattened slipper shape and bubbly, holey crumb.





But it made me feel much better to read another article that stated (after many helpful and detailed paragraphs full of some things I did not know, and some things that I did know but had forgotten about the fabled perfect baguette) that the author of the article had received better training in bread-baking than myself, and had been working on perfecting his baguette for 5 years. So certainly there are no hard feelings if my first self-guided attempt is knobby and ugly and pale. Baguettes-1, Candace-0. See ya next round, punk...

Even if they ended up over-proofed, I did confirm one thing I read yesterday--that a short rise time develops less flavor. In fact, it's recommended to use a technique called poolish, or a starter, or to rise the dough in the refrigerator. The main idea of all of these methods is that the dough is at least a day old before it ever gets any heat. Letting this dough sit around in the kitchen all day today as I went about my chores built a toasty, yeasty, salty flavor that was noticeably absent in my last white bread. It's perfect by itself, and it's heavenly with a little butter.

These beauties have a great open texture, and I can't wait to toast them up and plunge the spears of bread into a big garlicky bowl of warm bruschetta.