Baguettes

On my way through The Bread Bible, by Rose Levy Beranbaum, the Baguettes caught my eye. Nothing is terribly difficult about the recipe, but it does take a while before you are eating fresh, warm bread.

The recipe called for both a Pate Fermentee (a stiff dough that is fermented overnight in the fridge) and a Poolish (a more battery dough that is fermented overnight at room temperature). These both increase the flavor of the bread and allow you to use much less yeast than normal for this amount of dough.

One change I was forced to make in the recipe was to use about half whole wheat flour and half AP flour, as early on Sunday morning when I needed to mix the dough I realized I did not have enough AP flour and a trip to the store was not going to happen. I think this made the bread a bit less tender than the AP flour would have, but the bread had a nice flavor to it.

The baguettes came out well, I would have preferred a lighter texture, but again I attribute that to the whole wheat flour sub. I'll make them again with the correct flour mixture to test :)

And one other thing I accomplished with this bread was to hear it crack after I took it out of the oven. I have read on countless other blogs about this miraculous noise, but I have never heard it before. Then, all of the sudden, I started hearing this cracking noise when I took the bread out of the oven to cool! I guess I did something right with this recipe.