Used the King Arthur French baguette recipe, with an overnight bulk rise.
Didn’t get as much height as I wanted, maybe I didn’t rise long enough after forming?
At any rate, they taste good and make good sandwiches, that’s the important thing!
by natemartinsf
7 Comments
Recipe link: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/french-style-baguettes-recipe
They look great! And nice crumb!
They look good!
Looks great!
Nice work. I may need to try baguettes again, it’s been a few years since I have.
I found it interesting they don’t mention anything about steam in the oven. I might try these.
In response to your question about what might account for the low volume:
I’ve never made a baguette recipe like this, so I can’t speak from experience, but one general factor that can affect volume is the scoring. The easier you make it for the bread to expand, the better your chances of getting more volume.
It’s tough to see in the photos, but I think I can make out a handful of scores that are almost perpendicular to the length of the baguettes. It can be difficult to do properly without a sharp lame, but it’s preferable to score almost 90 degrees in the other orientation; that is, to score nearly parallel with the length of the bread with overlapping cuts. This gives the expanding dough a much bigger “escape route” as it were.
To illustrate the point, below is an image of one of the baguettes I made this week. It was high hydration (nearly 85%), and as a result I struggled a bit with my scoring. You can see on the left side of the loaf I got one successful ear that expanded much better than the other two. In fact, the other two scores fused back together and merely split under pressure rather than opening up freely. As such, there was less volume on the right 2/3 of the baguette. (I will say that crust, crumb, and texture were still excellent; it was just a little more compact than I intended).
https://i.postimg.cc/2SRPrqT0/Baguette-Score.jpg
There could be many factors contributing to less than preferred volume. Improving scoring might not totally fix it, but it can at least help eliminate a variable.