In which I’ve made PERFECT baguette! Holy shit, IT’S A MIRACLE!

The #breadin5 dough has been hanging out in the fridge since the 17th, so today I baked it up and THE RESULTS were SPECTACULAR:

The crust is delicately crisp, and the crumb is glossy and soft with lots of holes. It actually did that singing thing when it was cooling from the oven! This is an IDEAL baguette!

It’s fucking amazing, this “artisan bread in five minutes a day” recipe/method/concept. Make a wet dough, leave it in the fridge, pull off a chunk and shape it and bake it in a hot oven with a bowl of water for steam: that’s it! That’s the whole thing! Super easy, no stress, and absolutely professional results.

I didn’t even need to buy anything — I used a big bowl for mixing and storing the dough, and instead of a baking stone I used my cast iron griddle. I don’t have a pizza peel, so I used a bamboo cutting board. In place of a dough whisk, I used the chrome handle of my silicon spatula. And while I did buy the book, I didn’t even need to: the recipe and method are right here. Never even used the bench knife I bought for sourdough awhile back, and, while the pastry mat is nice it certainly isn’t necessary. Basic kitchen stuff suffices.

All you really need is to learn how to form loaves, but that takes less than three minutes.

The dough smelled freaking amazing when I took it out of the fridge today, really fruity and yeasty, but I couldn’t taste any difference between the loaf baked on day 2 and the ones baked today, so it probably needs to spend a dozen days in the fridge to start to get sour.

I’ve just started a second batch with this yeast:

…mostly because that’s the only yeast I have left in the house, but I have high hopes for the results!

I ordered a bunch of soft, bloomy rind cheeses on Friday and am expecting them Monday or Tuesday. Super stoked that I’ll be ready for them with a fantastic, delicious baguette!