GBBO Translation: Baguettes

Bonjour, mes amis! C'est la semaine du pain! That is, it's bread week! (If you're fluent in French, feel free to leave a comment correcting that, if necessary!) 

Over the weekend I was making some French toast (which I understand is not actually French), and my recipe uses a bit of flour mixed into the milk and egg. As I whisked in the flour, I thought longingly, "Ooh, I want to make some bread!" and then I realized, lucky me, I had already promised to do bread for my next post! Specifically, the baguettes that Paul Hollywood set as the technical challenge for the GBBO bakers during bread week of Series 6 (Netflix and PBS Season 3). This recipe is also featured in the Masterclass episode that aired with/after that series (available on Netflix as Great British Baking Show: Masterclass, Season 3 Episode 2). 

I do truly love making bread, although I don't do it terribly often, and I'm still building my skill. Bread takes time, which I often have difficulty coordinating, and few things render my willpower so flimsy as freshly baked bread, so lots of bread around the house means lots of bread in my belly. People often tell me that they're afraid to try baking bread, and I can understand where they're coming from: yeast can be intimidating! But if you bake as a therapeutic outlet (like I do), frosting a cake will never drive away your tensions the way that hand kneading a good bread dough can. Bread is also one of the few bakes that allows you such insight into its progress as it's being made. If you hand knead, you can feel the dough change as it gets softer, smoother and more elastic. Sometimes I'll try a new recipe and as I'm kneading I wonder if I've made some huge mistake because it just feels... wrong. But a few minutes later, it suddenly changes and the world is soft, springy, and beautiful again.

Paul's recipe doesn't call for hand kneading, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed. But it should make a fairly wet dough, which is typically harder to knead anyway, and if it yields a crispy crust and soft, airy interior, I suppose that's a fair exchange. Anybody else ever look longingly at their baguette at Panera, willing it to divulge the secrets of its sublime texture? No? Just me then? Well, I've wanted for quite some time to create the perfect baguette, and I'm hoping that Paul Hollywood will help me find my way. I've re-watched the original episode and the masterclass to prepare myself, and I searched out Paul's recipe from the official GBBO site and copied it below so you don't have to click through if you don't want to:

olive oil for greasing

500g strong white bread flour, plus extra for dusting

10g salt

10g instant yeast

370ml cool water

1. Lightly oil a 2.4 litre square plastic container with olive oil. (It’s important to use a square tub as it helps shape the dough.)

2. Put the flour, salt and yeast into the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook (don’t put the salt directly on top of the yeast). Add three-quarters of the water and begin mixing on a slow speed. As the dough starts to come together, slowly add the remaining water, then continue to mix on a medium speed for 5-7 minutes, until you have a glossy, elastic dough.

3. Tip the dough into the prepared tub. Cover and leave for 1 hour until at least doubled in size.

4. Dredge a linen couche with flour and lightly dust the work surface with flour.

5. Carefully tip the dough onto the work surface. Rather than knocking it back, handle it gently so you can keep as much air in the dough as possible. This helps to create the irregular, airy texture of a really good baguette. The dough will be wet to the touch but still lively.

6. Divide the dough into 4 pieces. Shape each piece into an oblong by flattening the dough out slightly and folding the sides into the middle. Then roll each up into a sausage – the top should be smooth with the join running along the length of the base. Now, beginning in the middle, roll each sausage with your hands. Don’t force it out by pressing heavily. Concentrate on the backwards and forwards movement and gently use the weight of your arms to roll out the dough to 30cm long.

7. Lay a baguette along the edge of the linen couche and pleat the couche up against the edge of the baguette. Place another baguette next to the pleats. Repeat the process until all 4 baguettes are lined up against each other with pleated couche in between each. Cover the baguettes with a clean tea towel and leave for 1 hour, until the dough has at least doubled in size and springs back quickly if you prod it lightly with your finger.

8. Preheat the oven to 240C/fan 220C/gas 9 and put a roasting tray in the bottom of the oven to heat up.

9. When the baguettes are risen, dust them lightly with flour, then slash each one 4 times along its length on the diagonal, using a razor blade or a very sharp knife.

10. Fill the roasting tray with hot water to create steam and put the bread into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the baguettes are golden brown and have a slight sheen. Cool on a wire rack.

Most of the translation for this one is just unit conversion, but I've also pared down the instructions so they're easier to glance through while I work:

olive oil for greasing

500 g/17.6oz/3.33cups bread flour, plus extra for dusting

10 g/0.35 oz/1.5tsp salt

10 g/0.35 oz/2tsp instant yeast

370 ml/12.5 oz/1.5 cups + 2 teaspoons cool water

1. Lightly coat the inside of a 2.5 quart square plastic container with olive oil.

2. Add the flour, salt, and yeast into the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add three-quarters of the water and begin mixing on a slow speed. As the dough starts to come together, slowly add the remaining water, then continue mixing at a medium speed for 5-7 minutes, to form a glossy, elastic dough.

3. Transfer the dough into the prepared tub. Cover and leave for 1 hour until at least doubled in size.

4. Dredge a linen couche or a smooth kitchen towel with flour and lightly dust the work surface with flour.

5. Carefully tip the dough onto the work surface, handling it gently to keep as much air in the dough as possible.

6. Divide the dough into 4 pieces and gently shape each piece, first into a rectangle and then rolling into a long log, keeping the seam to the bottom. Gently roll out the log to 12 inches long.

7. Lay one baguette along the edge of the linen couche or towel and pleat the couche up against the edge of the baguette. Place another baguette on the other side of the pleat. Repeat until all 4 baguettes are lined up with pleated couche in between each. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave for 1 hour, or until the dough has at least doubled in size.

8. Preheat the oven to 465F and put a large pan or roasting tray in the bottom of the oven to heat up.

9. When the baguettes are risen, dust them lightly with flour, then slash each one 4 times with a bread lame, razor blade, or very sharp knife.

10. Fill the roasting tray with hot water to create steam and put the bread into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the baguettes are golden brown. Cool on a wire rack.

Let's get started, or since this is a French bread (arguably even, the French bread), allons-y!

I switched up the order of instructions (just slightly), and started with weighing out the ingredients. If you don't have a scale, I've included volumetric measurements as well, but please keep in mind that your results may not be as consistent. But if I waited until I had a kitchen scale to start baking, I never would have started, so don't let that stand in your way! The flour, salt, and yeast went into the mixing bowl.

Captain (dough) Hook

Like I said before, I usually prefer to hand knead bread, but this is a wet dough, so my stand mixer was ready to do most of the work dressed up like Captain Hook. While the dough was kneading, I took an opportunity to get my bowl ready. I really don't have plastic containers, so I definitely didn't have the required 2.4L square tub. I used a bowl, ignoring Paul's warning that it was important and would help shape the dough. I soothed my worried mind with the knowledge that in the Masterclass, Mary Berry specifically asked if you could use a bowl instead, and Paul shrugged it off with a nonchalant "of course." So while the mixer worked away on the dough, I put a little olive oil in my big glass bowl and spread it around. I also snuck a little into the dough (a tip from Masterclass).

Mmm.... Gluten....

I couldn't help myself. When the dough looked pretty well kneaded, I had to get my hands in it. I dumped it onto the counter and kneaded it by hand for just a minute or so to get a feel of it. It was pretty soft, and a little sticky, but not nearly as much as I expected. It didn't really stick to the counter, and only stuck to my hands when I squeezed much too hard. It was also much stretchier than I'm used to, which was pretty neat. All in all, it felt like good dough. I plopped it into the oiled bowl, turned it over once to coat, and covered the bowl with plastic wrap. Sometimes I'll let my bread rise with just a tea towel covering the bowl, but this runs the risk of the dough drying out a bit (especially in winter when the air is so dry), so plastic was definitely the way to go this time.

I also decided to let my dough rise at room temperature, which was a little cooler than normal. A proving box probably would have sped things up, but I don't have one of those, and a slow rise allows the bread to develop a better flavor. I could have sped up the process a little bit with my other trick: if you have a mounted microwave, turn the light on underneath it, and let the dough rest in the microwave. Don't run the microwave, just let it serve as a makeshift proving box. I have done this before and it works great. I didn't do it this time, though, and my dough really ended up needing about an hour and a half of rise time before I was ready to shape the loaves.

Smooth towel vs bumpy towel

Regarding the use of a couche: I don't have one. I used a smooth kitchen towel for this (that is, the kind without fluffy loops; see my comparison picture if I'm not explaining this well). My towel was also a little floppier than how the couches on the show appeared, so I placed my towel on top of a silicone rolling mat for a little extra support. I thought about purchasing a couche, and may still for future use, but the point of this blog is to try the recipes and share them in a way that encourages other people to try them as well. Bearing that in mind, I hope to show you how this works without specialty equipment so you will be more likely to try it yourself. I also don't have a bread lame for cutting the tops of the bread, so I just used a very sharp kitchen knife.

Stretchy dough!

Once I was satisfied with my makeshift couche and it was adequately dusted with flour, I poured the dough out of the bowl and onto a floured section of counter top. My dough didn't exactly ooze out as I expected, so maybe I needed more oil coating the bowl. I helped it along with my hands, still trying to knock as little air out of the dough as possible. Then I divided it into four parts and started shaping them. I gently prodded them into a rectangular shape and rolled them up and out. I also confess that I didn't measure how long I rolled them, and with very little effort I was getting them a bit longer than the specified 30 cm (12 inches), but I really wasn't too concerned with that. It did end up showing in the final product as they were a bit narrower than I would have liked. They were also a little irregularly shaped, which didn't correct itself with the second rise or baking, so be warned!

With each baguette shaped and nestled in the towel, little pleats between each one, I propped up the outside edges and held them with something long and heavy. In this case, I used a couple of good-sized knives, which made it look like the baguettes live in a rough neighborhood, going to bed so heavily armed.

After another hour and a half, the baguettes looked about as risen as they were going to get. They weren't quite as big as I hoped, but again, I think they'd have done better if I hadn't rolled them as long and if my kitchen had been a little warmer. When my oven was hot, I prepared to move the baguettes onto a pan. I used a regular lipped cookie sheet for baking these (actually one big one and one little one). The bakers on the show (both regular and Masterclass) used two flat cookie sheets, and put two baguettes on each one, but I couldn't really do this feasibly. My oven has an exposed element and only two racks, so I had to use one rack for my steam pan, leaving me one usable rack for baking. I carefully put three of the baguettes onto one pan and the other baguette diagonally onto the small pan. I was really afraid that moving them like this (with my hands, no fancy tools) would deflate them, but they seemed alright. I quickly slashed them, put them in the oven, and poured hot water into the steam pan. Worth noting: I put the steam pan (just another lipped cookie sheet) in the oven ahead of time to heat it up with the oven. I wanted to make sure that it would start making steam as soon as the water hit it, rather than using precious baking time to heat the water to a steaming point.

#Nofilter #juststeamonthecameralens #dewyglow

At about twelve minutes, the smell of baking bread was making me dance around my kitchen. At twenty minutes, the baguettes were looking pretty good, but I wanted to make sure they had a really crisp crust and so I left them in for the full 25 minutes. It was a good decision. When I brought them out of the oven, they looked and smelled AMAZING, and I moved them to a wire cooling rack. Even though I put the loaves directly onto the pan (no parchment or baking mat), I was very pleasantly surprised to find that they didn't stick to the pan at all, and came right off.

Jab, jab, "No, it's not underbaked!"

Oh, buddy, I tell you, it was hard to let these babies cool enough before tearing into them. I started with the ugliest end of the wonkiest baguette, and honestly the texture of that part... was a little disappointing. It still tasted great, but it didn't have the big irregular holes I was hoping for. As I worked my way through the baguettes, though, I did find the structure I was looking for. The crust was beautifully crisp and crackly, and the inside was soft and fluffy. I even jabbed my finger at the airy inside of the bread the way Paul always does. Lo and behold, it sprang back! It seemed perfectly baked! They just definitely were not four identical baguettes.

Crumb, torn

But I'm happy with them anyway! They're excellent alone, with a bit of butter, or dipped in a soup or sauce. I did find that if you wrap them in plastic wrap overnight, the crust gets a bit softer. I prefer a tougher crust on a baguette, and just wrapping them in a clean kitchen towel or a paper bag kept the texture more true. 

Crumb, cut

And how about the time? The bakers were given two and a half hours to complete this bake, which looks like it should be barely enough. I obviously didn't limit myself by that standard because it's January and I knew my kitchen might be cold enough that the bread would need a bit longer to get enough of a rise. With the longer rising time, the whole project took me right at three hours and fifty minutes from weighing my ingredients to pulling the loaves from the oven, and keep in mind that a significant amount of that (almost 75%) was just letting the dough rise, which meant I had plenty of time to do other things while the yeast worked its magic.

Second Take

I already told you I love baking bread. I love baking it almost as much as I like eating it (which is a LOT). Normally when I make a recipe for a blog, I make it once, carefully documenting it from start to finish. Everything I have posted about the baguettes up to this point was about the initial effort, to stay truer to the technical challenge aspect of my theme. But I'm curious, and I love bread, and I started working on this blog far enough in advance that I had time to give it a few extra tries before sharing my results with you. I gave the baguettes a second try to hopefully find answers to a couple of my own questions. I wanted to compare the rise I got from proving on the counter versus rising in the microwave. I also wanted to see if I could achieve a cracklier crust by spritzing the baguettes with water prior to baking. And while I was at it, I decided to see if a little more olive oil in the bowl would help the dough come out better after the first rise.

I won't walk you through the whole process again, because it was largely the same as before. But this is what I learned on Take Two:

• I doubled the olive oil in the bowl. The dough stuck the exact same amount as before. To prevent sticking, maybe don't use a large glass bowl. 
• The dough rises faster and bigger proving in the light-warmed microwave. It was really rather impressive. 
• I divided the dough into two (rather than four) for the second attempt, and spritzed one with water before putting them in the oven (I still used the steam pan), and I don't know if the spritzed loaf was crispier but it definitely browned a little better than the dry loaf. 

But the second trial hit a bit of a snag. Some combination of the loaves being actually bigger (half of the dough each, rather than a quarter) and them being more risen meant that they were also more fragile. When I moved the baguettes from the couche to the baking sheet they became rather deformed and deflated. They puffed back up somewhat when I baked them, but they were not nearly as glorious as before I had moved them, and the texture, while not quite dense, was not the beautiful irregular masterpiece that resides within each perfect baguette. I knew I would have to try again. Not for my readers, not for Paul Hollywood, but for myself. And third time's the charm, right?

Before I tragically deflated the second attempt, I could tell that the loaves had some really great air bubbles going on inside because I could see a couple of dark spots under the translucent skin of the bread. I needed a way to not move the baguettes off of the couche. Since I was already using a silicone rolling mat as support, I wondered what would happen if I used the silicone baking mat and simply didn't use the towel on top of it. Then the mat, which is oven proof to over 500 degrees Fahrenheit (double check with the manufacturer of yours before you try this), could go right into the oven with the bread (and not catch on fire, the way a linen couche would).

This bakeable couche method was not quite as brilliant as I had hoped. The bread definitely retained its shape better, but I didn't flatten the pleats before baking, and the sides where the pleats held the loaves up didn't brown or crisp very well because of the restricted airflow. They also didn't have the inner texture that I hoped they would as they still deflated just a bit when I slashed them. They weren't dense, but they weren't as airy as the first batch. I think the slower, cooler, less dramatic rise really contributed to the texture of the original batch, and while I still haven't achieved my personal goal of making a baguette like you can find at Panera Bread, I am forced to admit that Paul Hollywood's recipe and methods are pretty dang good. I also am forced to admit that I have eaten far too much bread this week. And I loved every minute of it.

Paul Hollywood's Baguettes in Translation

olive oil for greasing

500 g/17.6 oz/3.33cups bread flour, plus extra for dusting

10 g/0.35 oz/1.5tsp salt

10 g/0.35 oz/2tsp instant yeast

370 ml/12.5 oz/1.5 cups + 2 teaspoons cool water

1. Lightly coat the inside of a 2.5 quart square plastic container with olive oil.

2. Add the flour, salt, and yeast into the bowl of a mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add three-quarters of the water and begin mixing on a slow speed. As the dough starts to come together, slowly add the remaining water, then continue mixing at a medium speed for 5-7 minutes, to form a glossy, elastic dough.

3. Transfer the dough into the prepared tub. Cover and leave for 1 hour until at least doubled in size.

4. Dredge a linen couche or a smooth kitchen towel with flour and lightly dust the work surface with flour.

5. Carefully tip the dough onto the work surface, handling it gently to keep as much air in the dough as possible. The dough will be wet to the touch but still lively.

6. Divide the dough into 4 pieces and gently shape each piece, first into a rectangle and then rolling into a long log, keeping the seam to the bottom. Focus on the backwards and forwards motion and gently allow the weight of your arms to roll out the dough to 12 inches long.

7. Lay one baguette along the edge of the linen couche or towel and pleat the couche up against the edge of the baguette. Place another baguette on the other side of the pleat. Repeat the process until all 4 baguettes are lined up against each other with pleated couche in between each. Cover the baguettes with a clean tea towel and leave for 1 hour, until the dough has at least doubled in size and springs back quickly if you poke it lightly with your finger.

8. Preheat the oven to 465F and put a large pan or roasting tray in the bottom of the oven to heat up.

9. When the baguettes are risen, dust them lightly with flour, then slash each one 4 times along its length on the diagonal, using a razor blade or a very sharp knife.

10. Fill the roasting tray with hot water to create steam and put the bread into the oven. Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the baguettes are golden brown and have a slight sheen. Cool on a wire rack.