Baguettes at Home

OUR STORY SO FAR:  As I said in my piece on Bechinalt, I have a recipe for French bread.  I also claimed that I was going to publish it, so I guess I better come through.

This recipe may be the oldest one in my collection, because when I found it, I was in high school, and still in the Library Club, and that probably made me a sophomore at the time.  I spent a lot of time those years learning the practicalities of what makes a library operate.  My freshman year the librarian was a sweet old maid who had spent half her life running the library, and was past due for the superannuated list.  When she had a stroke during the fall semester, that was it and she had to take medical retirement.  Her replacement was a former typing teacher who had two objectives—Friday and payday.  Now she spent her time sitting around and reading the newspapers and if much work got done, she wasn’t the one who did it.  Both of them knew I was the son of the local county librarian, and as such had some dim idea of what to do about cataloging, accession, and other operating mundanities.

The result was that when I got to the library at study hall (everybody in school had a mandatory study hall, not that a great lot of studying got done in them, but that depended on who was in your study hall—if you got a bunch of jocks, just hang it up and hope that they didn’t start flinging furniture), I headed for the workroom instead of sitting around outside gossiping.  I pasted date due slips and pockets, painted spines and lettered Dewey numbers with a hot pen and transfer tape, cooked up catalog cards, and sometimes assigned Dewey and Cutter numbers myself (traditionally the librarian’s responsibility).

You may have got the idea I was a privileged character.  You may be right.  Number one, my freshman year of high school (1971) was the first time the Library Club had ever let a man be a member.  There were five of us got in that year, and I think I was the only one did a full four years.  Second, as mentioned above, I grew up with the county library; I was two and a half when it was founded by a bunch of young matrons, including my mother.  Mother bettered Tom Landry’s record as The Only Librarian the Comanche Public Library Ever Had, except that at the beginning she wasn’t the librarian for a year or two . . . she was having kids instead.  So my grandmother was officially the librarian.  Same difference.

The story in the family goes that I spent that first year of the library helping out by not being in the way; if I got tired, then I went over in the kids’ section, curled up on the carpet (donated, like everything else those first years, and the only piece of carpet in all of the courthouse, in whose basement the library lived), and went to sleep.  Later, after I could read and understand shelf numbers, I was put to reshelving books and sometimes working the checkout desk.  Naturally, I got a fair amount of “What do you do about running a library” by osmosis, and that was what Miss Nobia (and Marguerite after her) used.

Of course, even in an active school library (and heaven knows, our wasn’t that active) there come times when you sit around because you’re between jobs.  And it was at such a time I picked up a copy of a new magazine the library was getting called Texas Monthly and found an early (ante Paul Prudhomme) column on Cajun cooking, explaining etouffée, gumbo, and French bread.  So okay, I thought it was neat, and it didn’t look very hard.  Besides, I now knew the difference between cornmeal and flour (you know, that little episode was connected with the Library Club too—did I just discover an Unconscious Theme in my culinary history?), so I figured I could make it come out.  I did, and still do occasionally, although making French bread for non-commercial bakers can be a pain low in the back, and I mean very low.

The main thing a commercial baker has to make his baguettes (that’s what we’re talking about, those torpedo-looking loaves that Picturesque Frenchmen carry around in the baskets of their Picturesque French Bicycles) come out that you likely don’t is an oven with a steam system.  That nice, crunchy crust is produced by pumping steam into the oven at regular intervals during the baking, and if you want good baguettes, you’ve got to find a way to imitate that steam bath.  Ish ka bibble; so I’ll tell you two ways to do it.

BAGUETTES

Combine the water, salt, yeast, and sugar in a small bowl, stirring to dissolve the yeast.  Add the shortening and let stand to proof.  This means wait up to five minutes to see if the mixture foams.  If so, your yeast is alive and it’s OK to go ahead.  If it doesn’t foam, you either got your water too hot and scalded the yeast to death, or it’s too old and you need to go buy some fresher.

Sift the flour into a large bowl.  Make a well in the center of the flour and gradually add the liquid, stirring constantly.  This is easiest done with a large wooden spoon.  Stir until the dough makes a large ball and starts to pull together instead of sticking to the sides of the bowl.  Turn the dough out onto a floured board and knead for ten minutes.  Place the dough in a lightly greased bowl, oil the top lightly so it doesn’t dry out and turn into plaster-of-Paris on you, cover the bowl with a clean dish towel, put it in a warm (80° F.) dark place, and let it rise for ninety minutes.  Punch the dough down, and let it rise again for thirty to forty-five minutes.  Now turn the oven on, and set for 425° F.  Punch the dough down once again and let it rest for ten minutes.

Turn the dough out on a floured board and roll it out into a ten-by-fifteen inch oblong.  Roll up the dough tightly toward you, beginning with the wide side.  With a hand on each end of the loaf, roll it back and forth to tighten and seal the ends.  Place the loaf diagonally on a greased and cornmeal-sprinkled cookie sheet.  Slash the top at two-inch intervals, and let it rise uncovered for about ninety minutes.

Now here’s how you get the steam.  If you have a plant leaf mister, use that to spray the loaf with a fine mist at the prescribed intervals.  If you don’t, make sure you put the bread on the top rack of the oven, and underneath it put a metal pan to get very very hot.  Then pour just a dab of water in at the specified times.  Pour very little water in each time; you don’t want to drown the bread, you want that water to evaporate just about as soon as it hits the pan.

For the first fifteen minutes, you are going to steam that bread every four minutes.  After that, turn the heat down to 350° F. and bake for twenty minutes longer.  You don’t have to steam it any more.  When done, the baguette should be golden brown and slide off the sheet easily.

Now you see why this is a pain to do.  It does take a bunch of labor and standing around with sprayer in hand.  However, you can do it yourself and it tastes just as good as what you get at the boulangerie.  The question then becomes, do you want to pay them for the opportunity cost of not having to hover over the oven door, plant sprayer in hand?

Madame Defarge polished the indubitable paper with an echidna.  Fnord.