This is a simple and unfussy daily bread baguette that I love to have with my family. We usually have a loaf of this baguette with a honeydew melon, pineapple or some other melon as our lunch. Various healthy additions can be made to this like wheat germ, flax seed meal and the like.
Mix 1 1/4 cups of warm water with 1 heaping teaspoon of your favorite yeast until those yeasty beasties dissolve into the water.
Then, add 3 1/2 cups of your favorite white flour and a heaping teaspoon of your favorite salt. We prefer unbleached organic flour with the wheat germ left in and unfiltered sea salt, but to each his own.
Mix this for 10-12 minutes. I use a stand mixer to knead, but it works to knead it by hand of course!
Then cover it and let it rise until it doubles. I find that at room temperature, it doubles at about 75 minutes, but anywhere close to that will be fine.
Once it has doubled, press down on the dough and expel the air (carbon dioxide). It can help to fold it over on itself to do this. Then, cover it again and let it rise for another 1/2 hour.
Now, take the dough and shape it into the standard baguette shape. Take your ball of dough and shape it into a rectangle. Grabbing the short ends of the rectangle, gently begin to pull outwards, stretching the dough until it’s almost as long as you’d like it. Then, roll it out until it’s like a cylinder. Yes, it’s like making the ever-popular worm/snake figure with play dough. Put the seam on the underside, place it on your baking pan that has corn meal sprinkled over it. Cover the dough and let it rise again for about an hour.
After it’s risen, take a bread knife and make a series of shallow diagonal slashes across the top of the dough. Put it into a 425 oven for 30 minutes.
Either before or after the final rising, you could give it a milk, egg or egg-milk wash by brushing either or a combination of milk and egg white onto the bread. You could also do it again after scoring with the knife. You could also bake it with some steam from a separate baking dish filled with water. Experiment and see what you like the best!
