I’ve never been to France, have you? I have often dreamed of going and bringing my children to explore the food, pick up on the language and enjoy the scenic views of the countryside. Until then, I have devoted myself to creating the perfect baguette recipe here at home. It hasn’t been without much patience, precious hours and a fair amount of good flour, though.
Easy Baguette Recipe + Little bit of practice = deliciously easy baguettes for you.
I have to say, once you start to understand bread dough, and get into a routine, making a baguette truly is easy. I’ve tried to make this as easy a baguette recipe to follow as I possibly can, but know that it might take a little bit of practice and a few trial and error batches before you get it just right. (However, your trial and error recipes will still likely be delicious!)
While Paris is rather notorious for bakeries loaded with wondrously crusty baguettes, they do, of course, go great alongside many of the foods you are already cooking at home, too. So you’ll find it delightfully easy to dip a generous hunk of this baguette into a winter beef stew, a haddock chowder, or whatever soup recipe you can conjure up in your kitchen. It’s equally as good alongside a root vegetable salad, or on it’s own with a butter, jam, or any kind of cheese you can find at your local market.
Ingredients needed for baguette or any basic artisan bread.
The ingredients needed for a basic bread is simple: you need flour, water, yeast and salt. Sometimes people will also use sugar, but I do not. If you prefer, you can use a teaspoon or so when you add the yeast. My favorite flour to use for making a simple, easy baguette is King Arthur organic flour. For yeast, I always use active dry yeast, like this brand, and a basic kosher salt is fine. If you have all of those ingredients, you’re ready to make some bread!
My Easy Baguette Recipe
A couple of important tips for when you’re follow my easy baguette recipe:
- When you pull the dough out of the bowl to knead it for a second time, you can easily just use a 4-fold technique. This is where you fold the dough in half, press down, and then fold again in another direction. Do this a total of four times, in all four directions (fold towards you, fold right, fold away from you, fold left) See the image below.
2. Make sure you steam the oven when you begin to preheat the oven. This is such a simple step, but changed my loaves so much! It really gives your baguettes that crusty outside layer. Simply put a small pan about halfway full of water on the bottom rack of the oven when you begin preheating the oven. As the water heats up, it will create steam in the oven, giving your baguettes a delicious crusty outside layer. Yes, you can keep this pan of water in your oven throughout the entire baking process.
A quick final note on my “easy baguette recipe”: Enjoy the process, and have patience. Bread making is 90% patience and 10% work. Be patient waiting for the dough to rise, and be patient if it doesn’t come out as expected the first time around. It takes a little practice, but being able to have fresh bread every day with just 10-20 minutes of active effort is more than worth it!
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