my first baguette!
My first baguette! I baked this yesterday afternoon. I used the poolish recipe from the new book by Ken Forkish (which I love incidentally), did the final mix on Thursday morning and baked a delicious loaf that afternoon for Thanksgiving dinner. That was a typical boule, baked in a Dutch oven. However, I had made a full KF batch, two large loaves, so I had a half batch of dough left over to refrigerate for later use. I had planned on using it for pizza dough but yesterday I decided to use half of it in an attempt to bake a baguette. I used instructions from a Peter Reinhart book to shape the baguette and to steam it (using water in a pre-heated cast iron skillet at the bottom of the oven). It turned out far better than expected -- beautiful and delicious to boot! I narrowly averted disaster however.... I had forgotten to worry about the size of my baking stone! Which, it turns out, is 22 inches on the diagonal and my baguette was just a tad longer than that... which caused it to droop over the edge and be somewhat misshapen on one end (somewhat visible on the left hand side in these photos). I will have to remember to limit myself to 20 inch baguettes in the future.