Saturday, April 18, 2009

Baguettes - Pain à L'Ancienne

Having spent some time in Europe growing up, I occasionally crave some good bread. A few weekends ago I decided to bake up a batch of baguettes.

Baguettes!

I ruffled through my favorite bread book, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart. I can’t say enough good things about this book. It’s accessible enough for most home bakers and yet is a nice bridge book for those wanting a little more depth and technique. I’m sure this book will come up again and again.

At any rate, within the book is an excellent baguette recipe called pain à l'ancienne (French for ancient bread). It features a relatively new bread technique known as retarding. Essentially, it means that immediately after mixing the dough, you put it in the refrigerator overnight to rest and ferment. Its a technique intended to slow the process to enrich the flavor of the final bread. It’s a good technique for the home baker since it gives you time and you don’t have to bake the bread the same day. Usually you can also keep the dough refrigerated for a day or two without much loss of flavor.

And now the process:

Ingredients

Here are the only ingredients (other than water) that goes into the bread. Just three: flour, yeast, and salt.

Measuring

Measuring out the flour. This is one of the things that you learn from this book (and others): always measure your ingredients when you can by weight. It is far more accurate than by volume, especially when dealing with compressible ingredients such as flour.

Mixing

The first mixing, using the paddle attachment.

Paddle mixing

A close up of the dough at this stage. Once all the ingredients are mixed, it’s time to switch to the dough hook.

Smooth dough

Here’s the dough after kneading it with the dough hook. You can see it is smooth and springy.

Dough after kneading

Another close up of the dough, this time after kneading.

Ready for retarding

Then the dough gets transferred to an oiled bowl and then put into the fridge.

Out of the fridge and resting

Here’s the dough a day later. It’s roughly doubled in size.

Gaseous dough

A close up of the dough in the bowl with its growing air pockets.

Turned out

The dough gets transferred out onto a floured surface after resting at room temperature for a few hours.

Getting ready for dividing

Gently flattening out the dough so that it can be properly divided.

Dividing the dough

The dough gets divided in half and then each half into thirds. Yielding six loaves.

Shaped and prepared

The dough gets stretched and shaped and transferred to parchment.

Cast iron frying pan

The oven gets prepared with a heavy metal pan (in this case a cast iron frying pan) to help generate steam. Right when putting the bread in pour hot water into the pan and shut the oven door to generate steam.

Baking

Then the bread bakes, three at a time.

Finished baguettes

The bread is finished!

Blistered crust

A close up of the blistered crust.

Eye

One of the “eyes” of a baguette.

Crumb

A close up of the varied crumb of the finished baguette.

1 comment:

  1. I love your blog :)

    You missed the step where you slit the dough to make that cool slit-look top to the baguette.

    Also, the bread was damned tasty.

    ReplyDelete