How To Make Baguette Dough

My love of bread is deep. If you asked me to choose between bread and chocolate for the rest of my life, I would choose bread. Between bread and cheese, I would also choose bread (although that choice would be cruel, because they go so well together). Between bread and potato chips, bread. Bread wins out over everything.

But not just any bread. I’m talking about warm from the oven, crusty, chewy baguettes, with bubbly holes that were made for holding butter.

My method of making baguettes gets you a delicious loaf (or two, or three) without taking over all of your counter space for hours and covering your kitchen in flour, as long as you have a baguette pan. Just keep some of this dough in your fridge, and you can have warm baguettes with less than three hours of time and minimal work (you’re not actually working on the bread for three hours, you just hop over every once in a while and do something simple). And your house will smell amazing.

The actual baking directions are coming tomorrow – you have to leave the dough in the fridge at least overnight anyway!!

If you do better with visual directions, check out the video at the bottom of the post.

Some of these supplies you might find handy, but you must have the bread flour and instant yeast, and I recommend either a baguette pan or French loaf pan. If you don’t have either of those you can certainly cook the loaves on a pizza stone or the bottom of a cookie sheet, but then you have to move dough around – trust me, the baguette pan is so much easier!

Kitchen Scale

Stand Mixer

Instant Thermometer

4 Qt. Dough Buckets

Bread Flour

Instant Yeast

Bench Scraper

Baguette Pan

French Bread Pan

Parchment Paper Pan Liner

Bread Lame

Crusty Chewy Baguette Dough

Adapted from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, a really excellent book full of ingenious bread recipes.

Ingredients

765 grams bread flour (about 6 cups), plus a sprinkle more for kneading

2 teaspoons table salt OR 1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt

2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast

2 cups lukewarm water (about 95 degrees)

olive oil

Directions

In your stand mixer bowl put the bread flour, salt, and yeast, and stir with a spoon.

Add the water and mix on medium-low in the stand mixer with the mixer paddle for one minute (or, if making by hand, mix with a large wooden spoon for one minute). Dough will form a ball on mixer paddle.

Let stand in mixer bowl for five minutes.

Pull dough off of paddle and switch to the dough hook. Knead on medium-low or medium for 2-4 minutes, until dough is tacky but doesn’t leave little bits of dough on your fingers if you press on it. If after four minutes the dough is still sticky, add a tablespoon of flour at a time, kneading for one minute after each addition, until the dough is tacky. (If making by hand, knead on a lightly-floured surface until dough is smooth and tacky, 5-10 minutes.)

Sprinkle a little flour on your work surface and knead the dough by hand for one minute, until you have a smooth ball.

Lightly oil a large bowl or dough bucket (it has to be big enough for the dough to triple in size – mine is 4 quarts and the dough rises almost to the very top). Put the ball of dough in and turn to coat it in oil. Cover tightly with plastic wrap or lid and put in refrigerator at least overnight, or up to 6 days.

See you tomorrow for the shaping and baking!!