Monday, January 2, 2012

ce n'est pas une baguette

Today, we embarked on a baguette journey to celebrate the first day of 2012. I hope your year ahead looks promising and brings health, happiness and bread.

IMG_2990

We found a simple, fail proof recipe from our dear friends at Allrecipes. I like to keep it simple on these early parts of our journey. No sense in jumping in head first.

Problem is, despite all the great reviews, it was not in fact fail proof. Or, I should say, it wasn't what it claimed to be. As the title states, "that is not a baguette".

The recipe calls for....
  • 1 cup water
  • 2 1/2 cups bread flour
  • 1 tablespoon white sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons bread machine yeast
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 1 tablespoon water

    Place the first five ingredients in to your bread machine, in the order suggested by your machine. I did water, sugar, salt, flour then yeast.


    I left the machine on Quick Dough (I used rapid rise yeast.) and 45 minutes later, I turned it out, into a well greased bowl (olive oil) and allowed it to double in size. This took about 40 minutes. Afterwards, I formed it as called for by the recipe. I didn't punch down as the recipes states, instead I turned the dough as suggested by this blogger. I held it in my hands and let it droop down, folding over itself. Then left it to rise for another 30 minutes.


    So, these aren't the best dough pictures as it was later when I made this bread, the sun was setting and the pictures was taken indoors at a high ISO.


    IMG_2977

    Here we have the ready to bake bread. It went in to the oven for the 25 minutes, suggested.

    Some things I screwed up....because yes, I'm still new at this. I didn't make it long enough or thin enough. It was probably to short and stumpy to be considered a well formed baguette. Also, one end is thicker then the other. Kind of considerably. Oops. Other then that, I did as told like a good little baker.

    Some things that were just screwed up....it wasn't crusty. At all. I had read that on some comments but I tried this recipe anyhow. It was also way to dense. Baguettes are light and chewy. This was not in anyway light.

    But here it is. I mean, don't get me wrong. We ate it.

    not a baguette

    Begrudgingly....

    No one even asked for seconds of the bread. It was that kind of eh. Final rating. A two. For not being what it claimed and for not being loved by the family. I didn't even bother asking anyone what they thought. For being too dense and not crusty. Pour ne pas ĂȘtre une baguette.


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