Hi All,
Thanks for stopping by, I had a "first attempt" at a new baguette recipe.... and it was tasty, but didn't rise as much as I had hoped. So while I was pondering the results, and cleaning up the mess, I absent-mindedly arranged it like this.
I don't know what I was trying to say, but it got eaten pretty quickly when I added some dips to the mix.
Anyway, I just hope you enjoyed the image.
Ham.
- Ham's Blog
- Log in or register to post comments
Welcome to TFL. There has been a lot of baguette baking going on here recently.
Hi Moe C,
Well who can blame folks for enjoying a good baguette? :-)
Useless fact for you, if you order a baguette in French, you can say:
However, if you'd like a magic wand (those of you with daughters, nieces, and granddaughters will understand)... and those with more than one will probably know this even if they don't speak a word of French...
Yes, the French term for magic wand, is "baguette magique". Because what French bread stick isn't magical?
I hope that's at least vaguely interesting!
Ham.
Very nice baguette photo, welcome to TFL. Lots of bakers doing baguettes suddenly again, nice to see.
Benny
In all shapes and sizes. Welcome to TFL. If you post your process everyone always enjoys the chat that follows. 🙏
A bit of context. Cheese making, other hobbies, and strange events in foreign lands are just the preamble:
Through what has to be one of the weirdest chain of events in my recent days...
A woman in the U.S. who I've never met, and have never seen, read my somewhat obscure article on cheese making books. That article was merely to share which books I'd actually read, used, and what I thought about each of them. I originally wrote the article because few book shops ever have cheese making books in stock and they do vary quite a bit in the intended audience and of course, price. (Think up to and including $800 Australian (which I believe is about $520 USD, 450 Euros at the time of writing). It's a long article.. with in depth reviews of most of the bigger/more popular books, and even cheese making books going back to the industrial revolution for more traditional approaches.
How did this set the scene?
Cheese making is a much smaller community than the bread making one, so to my surprise... it not only nearly crashed my server hosting that article, I had the authors of several books writing to thank me for the actually constructive criticism. Things died down after a while.... fast forward to June 2025.
Here is where "the U.S. Woman enters the scene"...
This woman, let's call her Sarah for expedience, is having a bit of a rough time. Sarah's a successful business woman who is going through a divorce. She's apparently always wanted to learn to make her two favourite foods; cheese and bread but her impetus was clear... (and I quote her here):
Sarah doesn't know how to do either, at this point. Looking for guidance on which books to get, she finds and reads my cheese book article... then proceeds to read almost everything I've ever written... doesn't matter the topic.. whether it's barbecues, wood working, gardening, DIY, how our renovations go, my reviews of various products... and then she gets to my section on 3D printing... which eventually linked to the 3D models I'd designed on one of the online repositories... She finds the message function on the repository site
I woke up and while eating my breakfast (home made toast of course) began perusing my workload for the day, and several messages pop up.
Let me just say....
Using a 3D printing site to discuss cheese, bread and a divorce, I thought I'd gotten the weirdest spam messages ever. She was thanking me for the helpful articles (plural now?.. Although I'm not sure what else she liked), and asking for some basic advice to get started in cheese making. She also noted that I had my "general tips for bread baking" but my bread section there was "woefully incomplete"... which honestly is incomplete and I wasn't aware of it being published yet.
So anyway this is where the story goes a little odd:
I'd linked my Paypal account to the 3D model repository, so if anyone found my models to be particularly useful, they could... buy me a coffee or something.. I don't get much, maybe 5-10 dollars here and there... but it's nice for my work to be appreciated. It basically pays for the filament I use when prototyping my models.
Suddenly, I get a bunch of notifications... Sarah, sent me one oddly sized payment after another... $14 here, $35.40 there, never more than $40 (maybe there's a limit on the site?) well anyway, a few hundred dollars later....
Another message pops up: "This should help you to read and review more books, that's one more account my ex can't use on his mistress." (although I've sanitised that quote somewhat).
I thanked her, and not sure what to say beyond that, I wished her well in her bread and cheese journey...
So I did what she asked. I bought a few more cheese books, but I also extended my bread library from 10-22 books. (I found a great second hand book store here in Australia) and I've been reading them, and writing a (still incomplete) bread making book page, to complement my cheesy one.
Here's the bread making process, finally!
This is the "same day, non-poolish, non-preferment baguette" from Le Cordon Bleu's - "Bakery School".
In short, this is about as basic as a baguette can possibly get. Of course, that didn't stop me from tweaking it a little by adding some poppy seeds into the mix.
You know how I was pondering how I got here... well I know how I got this result.. I just was playing it back in my head as I arranged my bread in the photo above.
Honestly, I was extraordinarily pressed for time (we were completely out of bread) so I rushed this one through between other baking projects... which cut the proofing time down a bit.
Alas, even though there are a lot of fine instructions in the "Le Cordon Bleu- Bakery School" book, one quirky omission was the size of the intended baguettes. I made mine thinner and longer so that the bake time would be shorter. But this had complications like.. I didn't own a pan long enough to accommodate it, and I really didn't have time to proof it more.
It tasted good, and would have been better if I had stuck with the program. However, there's real value in seeing thing when they go "off the rails" a little. Ok, it didn't rise as much (obviously), but it wasn't overly dense.. it just wasn't as open in the crumb as I'd like. The crust was crunchy, and worked exceptionally well with hommus and halloumi! (Although it disappeared so quickly I didn't get a shot of that).
Anyway, I think that for a basic recipe, it was about as good as you can get in that short of a time frame, between other projects.
The next baguette was the "Baguette with fermented dough" from the same book, the result was much better, have a look!
Anyway, that's about 70cm long.. sorry about the colour my phone is particularly.... old because I'm still rocking an iPhone 7 hehe.
Yep, I've made a lot of bread lately, but this is the best batch of baguettes.