Une Baguette

We did our New Year’s Eve dinner this past Saturday. Yes, I know. New Year’s Eve was a week ago, but that evening was a football evening, so the nicer dinner we usually have was put on hold for a week. The BaldMan steamed mussels with vermouth, tomato, Italian sausage, kale, onion, bell pepper, garlic, and maybe a couple other things. He asked me to make a baguette to go along with them. I like making bread, but baguettes have escaped me. One of the things I have wanted to do in this new year is figure out how to make one properly. Mine are good, though the shape is often too big and spread, and I can’t get the interior right. It should be open and airy with lots of big holes. Mine more often have a denser interior with very few real holes. I decided to try once again.

I began with my standard recipe for French Daily Bread from Daniel Leader’s book “Local Breads”. Leader is the owner of Bread Alone bakeries in Bocieville, Rhinebeck, and Woodstock, NY. This particular book features recipes, techniques, and information from Leader’s time spent traveling in Europe, baking and learning at foundational bakeries in multiple countries. His recipe makes three baguettes, but I only wanted to make one. Fortunately, he gives the baker’s percentages for all his recipes, so it was relatively simple to cut it down. (I say relatively because there is math involved and I am allergic to math!) I also decided to do this one by hand rather than pull out my Kitchen Aid mixer. I just felt it was silly to drag out the big, heavy mixer for that little dough, and I wasn’t sure how it would deal with that little volume. I normally use the mixer because the repetitive motion of kneading can aggravate the tendinitis in my hands.

It was a good idea. My hands didn’t hurt, and I really did enjoy kneading the dough by hand. As I noted in my New Year’s post, my word for this year is Mindful. I took the kneading time as time to practice, and really dived into the feeling of the dough and how it changed, bit by bit, from rough and clumpy flour bits to a smooth, barely sticky ball of soft dough. It was rather fun. I also took my time with the fermenting, turning, shaping and proofing. It baked nicely, with a crisp but not too thick and chewy crust. The size, I think, could have been a bit slimmer but really not bad. It’s got a kink in it that shouldn’t be there but I bobbled the parchment sheet when I was transferring it to the pre-heated baking stone in the oven. Overall, not too bad.

The interior? Still not as open and “holey” as I think it should be, but it’s on the right track.

It tasted good, and was perfect for sopping up some of the mussel broth. It’s heading in the right direction, for sure.

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My latest book is a collection of very short stories, half science fiction and half fantasy, called “Crossed Wires and Other Very Short Stories”. I have also written a few other short pieces, another collection, two novels, and an urban fantasy series. You can find most of them at Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and wherever e-books are sold. A few are also available from Amazon in paperback. My novel, “Circle Unbroken” is also on Kindle Unlimited, if that’s your reading preference. You can find out about all of them here.

There are also some stories you can read here on my site, mostly the yearly Halloween short I write, but there are a few others. You can read them from here.