Authentic French baguette recipe

I'm a bread addict. I started making my own bread because I just had to have quality fresh bread on a regular basis, and you can only find that at specialist bakeries in my part of the world. So it was quite an experience for me to visit Paris, where on every street corner you could walk into a boulangerie and hand over a little over a Euro to get a top quality fresh baguette.

In fact, they were so common that I realized that they couldn't be all that complicated if so many places were making them, and therefore I should be able to make them at home. Yet every home baguette recipe I had tried was unimpressive. Some were impractically complex, like the recipe in The Bread Bible that calls for pâte fermentée and a poolish, not to mention autolyzing and countless turns and rises. So I did some more research and came across this blog posting on thefreshloaf.com:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/8066/great-baguette-quest-n°3-anis-bouabsa

Here was an actual recipe in use by a top Paris bakery, and it was dirt simple. Now I was on to something. I was immediately successful with this recipe, and over time it has proven to be extremely reliable and adaptable to different flours.

Flour

Before I get to the recipe, I must talk about flour. I want to keep this recipe accessible for non-bread nerds, but you must understand that bread is basically just cooked flour. Everything else is there so just bring it together and enhance the flour's flavour, but your bread will only taste as good as your flour allows.

For my baguettes, I use equal parts President's Choice organic all-purpose white flour, and the white flour from Upper Canada Village in Morrisburg, Ontario. The Upper Canada Village flour is incredible flour. It is stone ground in a water powered mill, and is unlike any other white flour I have ever used. When I don't have this around, I stick with the PC organic all-purpose and substitute in about 1/2 cup of spelt flour. I have also played around with as much as 50% whole wheat flour (I find especially with whole wheat flour, quality is critical), although your baguettes will be denser. Rye and kamut flours are good too, but I would say you will need at least half the flour to be white.

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
3 3/4 cups flour (see above)
1/2 teaspoon yeast (that's right, not much)

Method

Combine all ingredients. I suggest doing it with a stand mixer and dough-hook, or using a bread machine. Kneed for about 10 minutes. The dough should be quite wet, although still cohesive. Let the dough rise one hour, knocking the dough down at the 20 and 40 minute marks.

If you have the Zojirushi bread maker, you can program it to do this part for you. That's means you just have to dump the ingredients in and start your program, and come back when it's done in a little over an hour.

Transfer for the dough to the fridge. Let it stay there overnight. It will rise a bit in the fridge.

The next day, take the dough out of the fridge and transfer it to a floured surface. How many loaves you make will depend on the size of your pizza stone. The wider it is, the longer the loaves can be, so the fewer loaves you will make. For a standard round pizza stone, you will need to split the dough in four. Form the dough into balls, cover and wait an hour.

Now it's time to shape them. GENTLY stretch each dough ball into a rectangle, then roll each long edge of the rectangle inwards and pinch the seems together, GENTLY. Then GENTLY stretch the log out to the desired length. Place the shaped loaves on a piece of parchment paper. Or if you have baguette pans, line them with parchment and place the loaves on there (this will make them more cylindrical, but note that most Parisian baguettes aren't perfectly cylindrical).

Cover, and wait another hour.

Preheat the over to 500 degrees F with the pizza stone in it, and boil a kettle of water. Place some kind of pan on the lower shelf of the over, below your pizza stone.

GENTLY slash your loaves. I find a sharp serrated knife like a bread knife is best for this. Pour the kettle of boiling water into the pan at th bottom of the over, then slide your loaves in. Then with a spray bottle, aggressively mist the inside of your oven. Mist every 5 minute. If you had your loaves on parchment when you slid them into the oven, pull the parchment away after about 10 minutes of baking. The loaves will be ready in 20-25 minute. Go by colour, they should be a deep golden brown. Let cool a bit, but eat them soon!

Sesame spelt crackers recipe

Gourmet crackers are all the rage these days. Why not have a lovely cracker to go with those wonderful cheeses, pâtés, charcuteries and spreads that you have. But I don't really want to fill up on refined carbs when I can avoid it, so I came up with these:

- Ingredients:

1 cup spelt flour
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon agave nectar
1/4 teaspoon salt (or to taste, I actually omit the salt)
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sprinkles (sesame seeds, big salt, cumin seeds, etc)

- Method

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Add all the ingredients except sprinkles to a bowl and mix until well combined. I start with a fork and then use my hands. Add extra water or flour as necessary, you want a fairly dense but smooth dough. (It doesn't need to be perfect however.)

Divide dough in 2 even pieces and get 3 pieces of parchment paper large enough to fit on 2 cookie sheets.

Roll dough on parchment sheets as thin as you can. Roll it out to around 7x11 inches. This will take a bit of elbow grease to get it so thin. Dust with flour if you need to, but not too much.

Sprinkle your sprinkles over each sheet of dough. I used black sesame seeds in the photos. Then use your rolling pin to press them into the dough. Dock the dough all over with a fork.

Slice the sheets of dough into whatever shape you want: triangles, squares, rectangles. Use a crinkle cutter if you've got it. Don't get too precious. Once cut, you do not need to separate the pieces, this will happen while they bake.

Speaking of baking, slide both parchments onto your cookies sheets and toss them into the oven for 30 minutes. They are done when they are dry and crispy. Don't let them over brown. They are ready to eat right away!

- Variations

Different flours such as whole wheat and eye may work. You could use flax seeds as your sprinkles, but you must first crack the seeds in a mortar and pestle in order to get any benefits from them.

Desserts

I love dessert. I say this again and again. All kinds of desserts: cakes and cookies and donuts and pies and ice cream and tortes and fruit and custards and … The list is never ending. There is not a dessert that I won't eat.

With liking so many desserts is, well, my waistline. I can eat way more desserts than my body is happy with. All in moderation is the name of the game. To that end, Husband keeps me in line and makes satisfying AND healthy* desserts.

* Healthy is no added additives or preservatives. There is fat and sugar in our desserts. We do not believe in low-fat additives of fakeness. Let's just be clear on that! :-)

So, Husband made pies. Strawberry during strawberry season which was late-June. And Blueberry during blueberry season which was July. Both were sweetened with agave nectar. Both had homemade pastry tops with organic butter and unbleached organic flour. The blueberry pie even had a touch of spelt flour tossed in.

Both pies were delicious and satisfying. Give me my desserts. Even when they are healthy options.

Garlic

At this year's Carp Garlic Festival, we bought 40+ bulbs of garlic. All different kinds of garlic: some hot, some mild, some peppery, some that tasted like grass. Yes, grass. The intention is to plant some of the bulbs in our own garden, and most of it is to eat.

We bought all different kinds: Spanish Roja - our favourite! - Music, Persian Star, Prairie Purple, and other kinds we don't know the names of.

Garlic is a cinch to grow.* Garlic grows much like tulips: plant the bulb in fall and come springtime, the little green sprouts will be the first things you see poking out of the ground.

We have been growing garlic for 4 years, and last year we had our own garden garlic last from harvest time - August - through until May of the following year. We didn't have to buy garlic from the grocery store! Our fresh garlic kept for all those months, in a paperbag, in a cool dark place. We will be doing the same with the fresh garlic we bought this year: storing it in a cool dark place, in a paperbag, and checking it every month or so for softspots.

We have not bought garlic from the grocery store in many years. The trouble with grocery store garlic is that it is often grown in China and shipped around the world. So by the time it is bought and arrives in your kitchen, it is old and dry, and usually tasteless. And what kind is it? Is it hot, peppery, grassy? Who knows. Grocery store garlic is only ever labelled as "garlic."

Try growing your own garlic. It's easy, requires almost no care, and you will notice the difference immediately with the first meal you make. You will wonder why you didn't do it before. If you don't have space to grow your own, buy freshly grown garlic. Fresh garlic makes such a difference to the foods you cook.


*This is not a garlic growing how-to. There are much better how-to's available on the web.

Reducing salt

One of the common themes that will come up frequently is the necessity to cook for yourself in order to control the amount of crap that you consume. Pre-packaged foods contain tremendous amounts of salt, fats, sugar, and chemicals that our bodies don't need. The more we eat them, the more our bodies want them, becoming addicted to them physiologically.

Salt is one of these over-used ingredients in pre-packaged foods that, the more we eat, the more we want. Our commitment to healthy eating started with the effort to reduce our salt consumption. It didn't start with trying to lose weight. Nice added bonus maybe, but not the primary motivator.

You just try to cut back on salt and see just how hard it is. Salad dressing, BBQ sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, whole tomatoes, pre-made muffins & cookies, salsa, hot chocolate mix (!!!!), ice cream, bread, juice ... The list goes on: "healthy" foods just as much as junk foods are packed with salt and other crap. Salt is pervasive and insidious in every single food around us. So how do we reduce our consumption?

We committed to cooking our own foods and not buying pre-made foods. We started small. The easiest things to eliminate were boxed pre-made food. We started making our own bread, salsa, salad dressing, cookies and muffins. It was better for us anyway, we could make exactly what we wanted! Other groceries were harder: what about mustard and mayonnaise and canned tomatoes? Some things we just had to reduce our intake, like mayo and mustard.

We started canning our own vegetables, particularly tomatoes. We make all kinds of canned tomatoes: roasted, oven-dried, and canned, no salt no sugar no oil added. Bought directly from the farmers market and 2 hours later, we have our own salt-free tomatoes.

Homemade tamales

Tamales are one of my favourite foods of all time. They are so light and fresh and I can taste every ingredient in them. Timmer makes them with fresh corn niblets - not from a can - and that adds alot of texture to the dough. He puts all kinds of different fillings in them. Sometimes it is cheese, cheese and green peppers, peppers and onions, chicken, beef, pork, and combinations thereof.

The ones above were chicken and cheese and onion. They were wrapped in real corn husks saved from the summer corn season and frozen in a Ziploc baggie. The tamales were steamed in the pressure cooker, which cuts down on the cooking time hugely!

The salsa was made from scratch. A green semi-hot salsa was made from jalapenis and tomatillos. The tomatoes are from our little vegetable garden and the tomatillos were from the locally-grown farmers market. Also served with steak (more on the beef in our freezer in a future post), tomato & tomatillo salad with homemade lime & organic olive oil and cilantro and garlic dressing, and organic apple juice. :)

That's the point of all of this: Timmer goes to the effort of making all of this fresh, local, good tasting and good for us food because otherwise I would be eating food from a jar or a box. I want sugar and salt and fat all the time. That is why my body craves. But the only way to re-train and re-learn how to eat well and eat good foods is to give my body foods that are good for it and foods that I love each and every meal.

My body, and my brain, like it.

And tamales are definitely one of those foods.

Challenges

So you want to try and make your diet healthier? Good luck with that. There are several substantial challenges that will make it more difficult:

• Diet trends are usually based on vast over-simplifications of nutritional needs, and not maintainable over the long term, and certainly not beyond when they are inevitably debunked.
  
• Government food regulation will always be several years behind the latest science, and heavily influenced by industry interest groups. Food labeling is only of minimal help, with several key data points missing.
• Food producers' and retailers' health claims cannot be considered credible. These companies are trying to sell products. The health claims on them are merely marketing messages, and how true they are is somewhat beside the point. "Healthy" food is also generally more expensive, as retailers see it as a value-add for which they can charge extra.
  
• The science of nutrition is a vast field with new discoveries being made daily (and old discoveries being invalidated almost as often). There is no way the average person can be expected to maintain a strong understanding of how different foods affect our overall health.

So to summarize: the diet people are against you, the government is against you, companies are against you, and science is against you. Those are some pretty intimidating opponents to say the least. It kind of makes all this pressure to eat healthy seem like a bit of a kick in the head, when the institutions that are supposed to help us are conspiring to make us less healthy.

I plan to write more about each of these challenges in the near future. But the plain truth is that eating well is hard and it requires real work.