French Baguette - How to Make Baguettes at Home - No-Knead French Bread Recipe

Hi, I'm Chef John from Food Wishes.com telling you how to

make

a perfect French

baguette

at

home

. That's right, I've gotten a lot of food wishes for this over the years and I always tell the person you know what you really can't. I would

make

a great French bag at

home

and list all the reasons such as flour and water in the oven with steam injection but that was before I tried it but once I did I realized I was wrong again, so I'm going to show you how to make Parisian bakery quality

baguette

in your own home and I think you'll be surprised how simple it is, so we're going to start with our French

bread

dough, we're going to use our famous no-

knead

method, which means we're going to start with a very small amount of yeast, which is only a quarter of a teaspoon, and we will put it in a bowl along with a little water at room temperature for which we do not need warm water.

This, I'm going to stir it a little bit, but we don't need to let it sit like we usually do, we don't need it or want it to start rising quickly, so give it a quick stir and I'll add that in as well. a little bit of salt and then of course the last ingredient, flour, and I'm not even going to use

bread

flour, fish, we're just going to use regular all-purpose flour, we're going to pour it in and take a wooden spoon. spoon and we're going to mix that and at first you're going to think wow, this is too wet and then as you continue to stir you're going to think, man, this is too dry, but then it will pass and you'll realize that this is going to be perfect and as you keep stirring and stirring you will get a super thick, super sticky dough that will eventually get all the flour off the sides, okay so just use your wooden spoon to work that dough. against the sides of the bowl and if you measure all the ingredients by weight, which I'm going to insist that you do, that's exactly what it should look like, very wet, very, very sticky, but again it comes together enough to separate it. the sides of the bowl, that's a big thing, once we get to that stage we're going to stop and then we're just going to wrap this in plastic, throw a towel over it, which is actually mainly for appearance and I'm going to put it inside an oven off for 12 to 14 hours or until it doubles in size and if it happens a little sooner it's ok if it takes a little longer it's ok but basically it should look like this this is what mine looked like after 12 hours. and then we're going to take a spatula and remove the air.

You can see how sticky, wet and stretchy it is. I probably should have floured the spatula, but it's too late, but basically we're just going to get the air out of that dough by scraping it off and we're going to do it on a very well floured work surface, so sprinkle a good amount of flour on it first. We're also going to want to sprinkle them on top. as well as having your hands very well floured and I keep emphasizing it but this dough is very sticky and it has to be like this so I only want you to use the minimum amount of flour that you need to work with this and everything that we are going to do.

What we should What to do is pat it into a rectangle, the main reason is to get all the air out, but it will also give us a shape that we can cut into four pieces of relatively uniform size and of course you can weigh them and make them perfectly uniform. but I can't even pretend to care about things like that, you think I'm afraid of

baguettes

that aren't all the same size, I don't think so, so let's divide them into four pieces to make our loaves, but before we start shaping them , let's make sure we have our pan ready, so I have a half tray with a baking mat, then I'm going to sprinkle with corn flour so it's prepped and ready for our loaves, so let's start shaping them and That's going to be extremely easy because all we're going to do is take one of those pieces of dough and we're going to sprinkle some flour on it again.

We're using the least we can do and I'm basically I'll just roll it like this and then I'll just roll it with my fingers like this starting in the center and rolling it up and stretching it out to the ends and in just a few seconds you'll be having something that looks like this and that's really all that's needed now, if you have obvious seams, put them under, but even that's not a big deal because once it rises it will look amazing and once our dough has been rolled out into a cylinder. or something like that, we'll transfer it to our baking sheet and if you need to level it out a little bit, you can do that here, but don't worry too much, like I said, when this rises, it's going to look AMAZING, plus that little bit of texture on the surface and those slight inconsistencies in thickness will add to that authentic French baguette look and once they are ready, a quick little optional step, I like to take a piece of damp paper towel. and just wipe off the excess cornmeal, this is going to go into a super hot oven like 550 and that extra stuff might smoke in the oven and then we're going to give the tops of our buns a generous coating of flour and then coat this very, very lightly with plastic wrap and then once they're covered we'll let them rise for about an hour to an hour and a half or until they're almost double in size and I have to admit halfway through I got totally paranoid.

My plastic was going to stick so I decided to sprinkle it very generously with flour and put it back on there and I felt better so why don't you flour your plastic wrap to start? But in the end, we're going to leave it. those loaves rose and this is what mine looked like when they were done, it was a little cold in my kitchen that day so this took about an hour and a half and by the way you've probably noticed I'm only making two. breads here, this

recipe

makes four small

baguettes

or two regular sized baguettes, but since for the most part this will be the largest pan you can get, we'll do it this way, so I'm going to cook two. cook the other two later and at this point we're finally ready to bake so we're going to preheat our oven to 550 or as high as your oven can go and we're also on the bottom rack and we're going to put a saucepan with water on it. that will keep the oven nice and humid which will be key to getting that authentic crust, so our oven is preheating and we're at the last official step, we need to take a razor and make some cuts in the dough, but we're not we're going to use a razor, we're going to use scissors, it's a lot easier, so take some scissors, hold them up and make a 45 degree cut, but the only problem with the scissors method is that it leaves these little sharp points what do you have. to poke, I mean, that's one of the first sayings you learn in baguette school, if you're going to cut, you have to get the point in, so remember that, so we're going to sink them and I said that was the last step, but actually This is the last official step before putting them in the oven.

We have to take a spray bottle and spray them well. Make sure the tops of both loaves are covered, and by the way, keep that spray bottle close to you. We'll use it again, at which point we'll put it in our preheated oven and bake it at 550 degrees for about 15 minutes or until it's done, but don't go anywhere where we have things to do it after five minutes of baking. I want you to quickly open the oven door and give both loaves a very quick baste. Quickly close the door again so that's the first spray at about four or five minutes and then we're going to do one. more spray after about 10 minutes and while we do this second spray we are also going to give the pan a turn so that it cooks well and evenly and by the way at this point don't worry if it looks ugly, you will see a little staining , don't panic because like four or five minutes later, when you take them out after about 50 minutes of total cooking time, you're going to see a couple of incredibly beautiful and absolutely authentic French baguettes, let me see them and I know them.

Look, exchange magnifique, you want to eat it right away, but you can't. You have to let it cool. Place them on a wire rack until they cool completely. Don't cut them hot, don't cut them warm, but after they have cooled. You will take a serrated knife and hear something that sounds like this. Oh yes, in fact, they can say that you can tell how good a baguette will taste by the sound. I totally agree with that and this did not disappoint. It came out absolutely perfect, that thin, crispy, crunchy exterior and the very tender, very light interior, while at the same time having that characteristic chewiness that baguettes are known for and of course the only way to make it better or more French It would be putting a little butter on it, so let's dig that out and get on with enjoying what really is one of the world's great pleasures.

In fact, it came out so good that I would like to apologize to all the French bakeries that we are going to take out. business when this goes viral, sorry guys but you had a good run so I really hope you give it a try. Visit foodwishes.com for full ingredient quantities and more information, and as always, enjoy.