(14-May-2013)
My wife loves the city of Paris, France.
We both lived in Paris for 5 years or so, so I started to get in thee habit of preparing food/pastries that remind her of Paris. (Previous attempts: macarons, butter, croissants, pain au chocolat)
So while living in Dubai, I decided to try my hand at making baguettes.
My searches on YouTube and Google came up with two promising recipes:
- Henrick’s video on making baguettes
- The Weekend Bakery’s 80% Hydration dough recipe
As far as I could figure, the challenges were:
- Finding a recipe to get close to the taste of the “Parisian” baguette
- Figuring out how to cook the long baguettes in the oven
For the first challenge, Henrick’s recipe seemed promising.
As for baking the baguettes, I actually found that I could make a makeshift baguette pan by cutting an empty gift-wrapping tube in half lengthwise, and lining each side with aluminum foil.
In retrospect, an 80% hydration baguette was probably not the most sensible recipe to try as my first foray into bread baking. It’s super-sticky, and almost impossible for a novice to shape and slash.
But I dove in anyway.
And in the end, the baguettes ended up coming out the oven pretty nice looking!
But when I bit into one, I learned one of the most valuable lessons in bread baking: without salt, the best bread will end up tasting like styrofoam. Which it did! It was so disappointing to spend all day on a recipe, have everything come out looking decent, only to have the bread be completely inedible at the end.
So while the baguette was not a complete success, or even edible, the bread baking seed was planted in my brain…and although I didn’t know it then, this was the beginning of a long-time relationship with bread baking.