Tag Archives: Baguette

August 9th, 2015

Bread Baking for Beginner XIX: Baguette with Pâte Fermentée

Baguette (4)Another wish for the Bread Baking Course was Baguette. And Baguette dough is a simple dough: You need just flour, water, yeast and salt.

But when it comes to forming and slashing, it gets way more complicated. Only one thing can help with this: Practice! For slashing you actually don’t have to even bake baguette, one can start practicing with paper and pen! As PIP onces wrote: “If you can draw them, you can slash them!” And so I made two practice sheets for you. One with reference lines and one without. You can print them and start practising right away. Try to draw the slashes on the “Paper baguette” in fluent movements without stopping while drawing a slash. Repeat this until you feel comfortable with drawing the slashes, then try it with the real one. And other ways then the traditional cuts are possible as well. In France I saw Baguettes slashed lengthwise as well!

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October 26th, 2014

Wheat Spelt Baguette

Dinkel-Weizen-Stange (2)

This Weekend I planed to bake the Baguettes which Sara posted on her Blog. But when I mixed the poolish I ran out of white flour. It was already late evening, it was cold and raining and I did not want to leave home again to run to the supermarket. Instead I checked what was left: rye flour was no alternative, but white spelt flour and a darker wheat flour was looking very good.  And because the planed recipe was now out of discussion I mixed a bigger batch sourdough with the darker wheat flour and made an autolysis dough with the spelt flour.

The next morning I kneaded the dough by hand and let it rise for the hours at room temperature with some folds in between. Then we left home to buy and plant some apple trees with my spouses parents. When we came home late afternoon I heated the oven and formed the dough to baguettes. When I pulled the loaves from the oven they smelled divined. So we ate one while still warm. And it tasted as good as it smelled. Crunchy crust, middle open crumb and a deep, complex flavour due to the two preferments and the cold fermentation. A unplanned bread which turned into a favourite!

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October 19th, 2014

Quinoa Baguette

Quinoa-Stange (2) The pseudo grain quinoa is a fast side dish I like to make instead of rice. The flat seeds stems from the Andens and are packed with protein and minerals and they are delicious! So I was directly hooked when I saw a bread made with a relative high percentage of quinoa because they contain no gluten. Sadly I can not remeber anymore, where I saw the bread. But I could not get the thought of quinoa bread out of brain and so I decided today spontaneously quinoa baguettes.

I used 30% of home milled quinoa and was surprised how well the dough behaved. It needed a little bit more water then I expected but after some folds it developed a good gluten network. The flavour of quinoa was well recognizable when I knead the dough and while baking the whole kitchen was filled with the aromatic nutty smell. I was really exited when I cut the bread after cooling down. The crumb is not as open as a baguette but moist and flavourful. The nutty taste harmonizes perfectly with some goat cheese and honey mustard!

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April 21st, 2014

Baguette variations

Baguette-Variationen

 

Another Idea I brought home from our holidays in Alsac is to cover a baguette with poppy seeds or sesame.  For the baking marathon last weekend I put the idea into practice and bake some Baguette au pavot (with poppy seeds) and Baguette au sesame (with sesame). After I formed the baguettes from my favourite dough with sweet starter (you can use this yeast dough Baguette, too) I wet their surface a little bit and turned them in sesame or poppy seeds. After proofing (according to the recipe) I slashed them lengthwise and baked them like written in the recipe,

The fragrance of the freshly baked baguettes were divine. And the taste were incredible, too.

This was not the last time baking these baguette variations!

January 26th, 2014

Baguette with sweet Starter

Baguette mit süßem Starter 2I planned to post about a potato bread today (something I will do later this week) but the result of an experiment I baked this weekend made me so enthusiastic that I could not wait to share the recipe with you!

It is a recipe for a baguette made with sweet starter – a very active but not sour sourdough – and a 24 hours rise in the fridge. The Idea to this baguette came to me when I taste a little bit sweet starter which I kept in the fridge for some days. The complexity of the flavour was fascinating. Despite the time the sourdough spent in the fridge it did not taste tangy or acidic. It has a mild flavour of lactic acid, like you would expect it in crème fraiche.  Beside that I could taste fruity tones and slight alcoholic taste due to the high activity of the yeast. It was a taste I wanted to catch in a bread!

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May 26th, 2013

Baguette royal 2013

Baguette royale

The Newspaper Tagesspiegel published an article about Ridha Khadher, who’s Baguette was the only one which get 20 of 20 points in the Best Baguette of Paris award 2013. In the articel, Monsieur Khadher mentioned the ratio of water and flour (T65) he uses, and gave a rough overview about the procedure. It was enough for me to build a recipe out of that.

A intersting point was that he uses nearly ice cold water (5,6°C) and kneads his dough more then other recipes I knew. Then the dough rest for 24 hours in the fridge, which seems to be a very important point for great baguettes, because Anis Baboussa (Winner of the award in 2008)as well as Jean-Noël Julien (Winner of the award in 1995) and Jean-Pierre Cohier (Winner of the award in 2006) opt in their baguette recipes for a long and cold fermentation instead of using a poolish or levain. Continue reading

November 2nd, 2010

Baguette with 3/4 Sponge and cold Autolyze

BaguetteIt’s again time for a bread recipe for the blog. The last weeks I played with two different methods: Cold Autolyze like Phillipe Gosselin used and the 3/4 Sponge I found in a recipe of Dan Lepard (scroll down for the recipe).

The recipe for the bread with 3/4 Sponge use only a minimal amount of yeast which is completely  added to the sponge, something that always fascinate me.

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