Baking Delicious Baguettes

Do you love a nice French Baguette?  What are you paying for that baguette today, $5-6?  Why not make your own?  The ingredients for the baguette I am holding in the picture cost me about 91 cents, paying retail for them. 

I love baking bread.  I got started 25 years ago when I really hated my boss.  I tried different things to deal with the frustration from work, like picturing his face on the golf ball and swinging as hard as I could at it.  That only caused me to deposit a large number of golf balls deep the woods or at the bottom of the water hazards.  I tried baking bread and the more I punched the dough, choked it, and picked it up and slammed in back on the counter, the better the bread tasted.  What a surprise.  I solved the frustration0 problem by changing jobs, but I really enjoyed baking bread and kept it as a hobby.

I am also not at all artistic.  Give me three tries with a ruler and I can draw one sort of straight line.  But baking artisan breads let me for the first time create things with my hands that I was proud of.  And few things smell better than freshly baked bread when it is ready to come out of the oven, nice and golden brown. 

So baking your own baguettes can save you money, reduce your stress and frustration, be a fun thing that you can be proud of, and have your whole family loving the smell and wanting a slice of the freshly baked bread.  Why not give it a try?

Being very honest – it took me  a number of tries until I got a baguette that I was very proud of, but all the other benefits were there from the beginning.  Attached is my recipe for baguettes developed over the years, with lots of pictures and notes on what I am doing and why.  I hope you can have as much fun with this as I have had.

You can download my recipe here.

One secret ingredient really made my bread better the last couple of years.  And I am sharing that secret here.  For years I would use bottled water to make my bread because tap water has chlorine and the yeast do not like that.  But on one of the TV cooking shows I heard about using the water from cooking pasta for bread baking and other cooking.  The cloudy water left after boiling pasta got that way from starches given off by the pasta when it is cooking.  The yeast loves those starches.  I often freeze three cups of pasta water after we make pasta so I will have it when baking.  It will keep for months frozen, and I leave it out in a bowl overnight to defrost the day before I will be baking.  You should salt your pasta water to taste like the ocean before you put your pasta in the pot to get the right taste for your pasta.  When I use pasta water for my bread I cut the salt added to the dough in half because that pasta water is salty.  Pasta water does not need to be filtered because it is boiled when making the pasta and that gets rid of the chlorine in the water.  It really makes a big difference!  I hope you give bread baking a try and have as much fun with it as I have had. 

I have been doing so many wine postings that I am way overdue on doing a food blog.  I have another one coming out about dry aging steaks.  You have seen several posts I have done on cooking dry aged steaks.  This one covers buying a whole Ribeye and dry aging it myself.  I will also be doing a travel blog about our Viking cruise in February to see the Northern Lights.  That one is way over due.  After my 3^rd post on Bordeaux wines under $30, this one recommending Right Bank wines, I will be doing one on five Italian white wines that I really like.  If you subscribe to this blog, you will get an email letting you know when those posts come out.