Newbie Gourmet

So, today I came into work all ready to go. You know, when you go into work in a mood to accomplish everything? Well, it was one of those days and I was on a roll (no pun intended). Cheesecake ingredients out, baguette dough rolled onto the table, pastry dough defrosting and butter softening all before nine in the morning.

Well, my boss came by and said she wanted to show me how to do the baguette rolls. I thought that was odd since I had done four batches of baguettes (maybe more) since I started working there and thought I had it down. I'll be the first to admit my last batch looked a little lumpy. Okay, a little deformed. Well, maybe a lot. It was because I was focused on making sure that each baguette was exactly one pound rather than baguette-looking. I knew they looked bad. What I didn't know was that everyone thought that they were, I mean, really ugly.

My boss said my last batch of baguettes looked like a bunch of "cancerous penises," and that they were "scaring the wait staff."

I laughed, because I was imagining how that conversation with the wait staff went. I asked the waitress about it later (she and I are friends), and she admitted that she had told Mary that I might have been sexually frustrated when I made the last batch. Maybe. I don't know.

In any event, this is how you make artisan baguettes look like baguettes and not like cancerous penises:



Put a good dusting of flour on your pastry board (or table, in my case). Use your hands to stretch the dough into a roughly rectangular shape with a width as long as your baking sheet (in my case a little under 18". Don't worry if you can't pull the whole thing out. In this picture, you can see I didn't have enough room on the table to stretch the whole thing out. I just focused on the end on which I was working. You can see it's about 18" wide. I use a scraper to cut my bread, but you can certainly use a knife.

Go straight across the dough and make sure it is nice and even, about an inch thick. The cut should look like this:


I always put the cut-side facing up, as in this picture. The dough rises better that way. After letting it rise for ten minutes, I cut four diagonal slits along the top, about 1/4" deep for artistic effect and also so that the bread doesn't split while baking. I let it rise another twenty minutes to a half-hour and spray it down with a lot of water before throwing it in a 400 degree oven. The water is what makes the crust crispity crunchety on the outside while maintaining a doughy soft interior.

This makes for delicious bread that is phallic, to be sure, but would never be called cancerous penis-like.

The baguette recipe I use at home is from The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.