They look pretty crusty to me

Time: 4 hours 10 minutes + Overnight

Ingredient Availability: 5/5

Difficulty: 2/5

I’m making baguettes in preparation for the French Onion Soup I’ll be making soon. I chose this recipe simply because it’s in a book that I bought: King Arthur’s Baking Companion. Pretty simple. I have pretty high expectations, though. Fresh homemade baguettes are supposed to be pretty good, right?

Key Ingredients & Omissions:

The ingredients for this recipe are super simple and I doubt you’ll have any issues finding any go these ingredients.

Tools:

Mixing Bowl
Stand Mixer (optional)

Cooking Review:

Poolish: 6 Minutes + 15 Hours

To start, I made the poolish by mixing together some flour, water, and yeast. The recipe doesn’t say to cover the poolish while it works its magic, but you should to prevent it from drying out. I let mine work for about 15 hours.

Mix Dough: 10 minutes

I transferred the poolish to the bowl of my stand mixer and added the rest of the flour, water, yeast, and salt. I mixed it with a wooden spoon until it formed a shaggy dough with some dry flour still in the bottom of the bowl.

Rest & Knead: 24 minutes

I let the dough rest in the bowl for 20 minutes before using the dough hook to knead the dough for 4 minutes, bringing the dough together and letting it become a little smoother and elastic.

Rise: 2 Hours 2 minutes

I removed the dough from the bowl, oiled the bowl, returned the dough to the bowl, and covered it while it rose for an hour. After an hour, it lifted the dough to release some air and folded it over on itself. I let the dough continue to rise for another hour.

Split, shape, & rest: 25 minutes

I turned the dough out onto a work surface and split it into three portions before shaping them into rough logs. I let them rest there for about 21 minutes.

Form Baguettes & Rise: 46 minutes

I rolled out the baguettes into long narrow logs and transferred them to a lightly oiled parchment paper lines baking sheet. I covered the baking sheet with an inverted baking sheet and let the baguettes puff for about 40 minutes.

Bake: 43 minutes

While the oven preheated with a baking stone, I added some water to a small pan to come to a boil to provide some steam for the bake. Once the oven had come to temperature, I tried my best the add some slashed to the top of the baguettes, first trying a paring knife before trying a cerated knife. I don’t think either one was sharp enough. I added the dough to the oven along with the pan of boiling water. I reduced the oven temp and baked the bread for 20 minutes before removing the oven to a cooling rack and letting cool completely before slicing.

Analysis:

This is some pretty good bread. Again, it’s not super easy to describe what makes homemade bread so much better than prepackaged breads from the store, but this just has so much more flavor and character. The bread has a decently crispy crust with a soft yet chewy crumb, which I really enjoyed. While it was a little difficult to work with as a sticky dough, I think it’s well worth making if you like bread in general. I don’t think there’s much more to say. It is a bread after all. I’m going to give this recipe a 8/10. The end result is pretty good. However, the recipe itself is lacking some details that could easily ruin it for some people, like not telling people to cover the poolish and not mentioning that you should flour the work surface to reduce sticking.

Baguettes