Baguettes!

Baked: September 11, 2025

I took the Artisan I class at San Francisco Baking Institute. I shaped something like 45+ baguettes that week. They turned out so well there, baked in the professional conveyor belt bread oven. I was scared to make them at home because I could not imagine I could get them to turn out as well. Then I was perusing the King Arthur Bread catalog, and I saw the baguette pan, and I thought “why not?”.

I used the baguette formula in Tartine Bread, which uses both a levain and a poolish (there is a long explanation in the book about why). I did not, however, have any bread flour. Having realized that too late, I forged ahead using only all purpose flour.

Once the final dough was mixed, it rose fast! No small surprise given it has over twice the amount of leavening as a typical sourdough in the Tartine Bread formulas. It was ready to shape in about 2 hours, and ready to bake after 2-2.5hrs of proofing.

The baguette pan is short which is good because it fits in a typical home oven. I adjusted the dough weight per baguette to 175g, so I guess technically I made demi-baguettes. Because I was working with a small portion of the dough at a time, I shaped and proofed three at a time and stored the remaining dough in the refrigerator until I was ready to divide and proof more. The dough did continue to rise, but overall this was very successful and I would do it again.

The muscle memory for the shaping and scoring was there, and I remembered how to use the couche cloth – thanks SFBI!

The final adventure I had with these baguettes was steam creation, which was actually the part that I was worried about. I had a mis-adventure using the soaked towel method described in various places, and I will not be using that method again. I ended up using the method which involves pouring boiling water into a hot baking sheet at the bottom of the oven. I have a kettle with a long spout, so I was able to do this without too much risk of steaming myself. I’m sure this wasn’t perfect but it seemed passable.

What would I do differently in the future?

• continue to iterate with steam – the crust was good but it lacked the tell-tale shine of proper steaming. At SFBI they teach a complex method involving a cast iron pan and cast iron ball bearings and ice.
• they were a little skinny. Maybe I would try with 200g of flour each.