Baguette
A lean bread of four ingredients where every characteristic comes from fermentation, shaping and steam rather than from anything added.
Also called baguettes (INTERNATIONAL), french bread (INTERNATIONAL), french stick (UK)
A baguette is flour, water, salt and a leaven, and nothing else. That is what makes it difficult.
With no fat, sugar, egg or milk to contribute flavour, softness or colour, every quality in the finished loaf has to be produced by process. Flavour comes from a long fermentation, often with a preferment. The open, irregular crumb comes from a moderately high hydration handled gently enough to preserve the gas cells. The crust comes from steam early in the bake, which keeps the surface flexible long enough for the loaf to expand before it sets, then dries and crisps once the steam is vented.
Shaping is unusually consequential. A baguette is a long, thin loaf with a very high crust-to-crumb ratio, and it has to be shaped with enough surface tension to hold that shape without degassing the interior — the tension is what makes the scores open.
What it should be like
- Structure
- Open, irregular, glossy-walled crumb
- Crust
- Thin, crisp and deeply coloured
- Flavour
- Wheat and fermentation, with nothing added
Where it comes from
Professional consensus
Agreed by professional bakers and baking-science texts, with an accepted mechanism, though not isolated by controlled experiment.
Strongly associated with France, where the long thin lean loaf became the everyday form during the twentieth century. Bread of this shape and leanness is older than the association and the name.
More in baking history and culture.
Related
Part of
The lean bread against which other lean breads are measured.
What this product needs done
Structure building
With nothing added, the network is the entire structure.
Gas retention
The open irregular crumb is gas held by a network developed enough to hold it and handled gently enough not to lose it.
Aeration
Yeast or a culture. A baguette is defined partly by long fermentation, because fermentation is where all its flavour comes from.
Hydration
Moderately high and unforgiving. Too little gives a tight crumb, too much a loaf that will not hold its shape.
Fermentation substrate
Flour’s own amylases supply the maltose. There is no added sugar in a baguette and none is needed.
Techniques this product depends on
A long thin loaf with an extreme crust-to-crumb ratio has to be shaped with enough surface tension to hold itself up, without degassing the crumb that tension is protecting.
Scoring decides where the loaf opens. On a baguette it is not decoration — an unscored baguette bursts at a random weak point.
Equipment involved
A lean loaf needs humidity for its first minutes, and a domestic oven vents any steam introduced into it. A lidded pot is the domestic answer.
Things that go wrong
The crust is too hard, too thick or not crisp
The product where crust is most of the point, and where the fault is most often noticed.
Recorded because the demand data asks about this fault under this product’s name, not because the fault is peculiar to it.
A lean dough where a tight crumb is unambiguously a fault rather than a style.
A lean dough with a short bulk, so the fault surfaces quickly.
Collapse shows as spreading rather than sinking, and the timing question still separates the causes.
The bread is crumbly and falls apart
A lean crumb that shatters rather than tears points at development or hydration.
The bread smells or tastes of alcohol, yeast or vinegar
A lean dough with a long retard, where sour and alcoholic notes are easily overdone.
The dough is too sticky to handle
A wet lean dough where stickiness is expected up to a point and diagnostic beyond it.
Covered in
The bread families, and what actually separates them
The lean extreme, where every quality is produced by process.