I can confirm that King Arthur AP makes great baguette.
There’s a lot of great advice here, even if only one poster expressed an opinion on the question asked, “Change recipes or stick with it one more time?”
I don’t have access to the flour you mention, and intended to use all the same ingredients, just less flour, this very evening, to see if I could get it as I desire!
But, in the end, switching recipes won the day, and I’m in the midst of trying that now. So, fingers crossed, stay tuned, I’ll keep you updated. In 15 mins it will be time to punch down, form loaves, leave to rise again.
(And, I will leave it rise longer, increase the heat, reconfigure the steam arrangement as suggested!)
I will consider my standard of living to have seriously improved if I can make fresh baguette whenever I crave it!
Thanks for all your help!
Hey, that’s virtually the exact recipe I’m trying now, though from a different source!
I’m at the ‘letting rise a little longer’, part now. Two dishes of water in the oven, currently preheating to 500, which I’ll drop to 450 when I put the loaves in. I have high hopes this time around!
If you are using quick-rise yeast, it does work better if you use a little sugar, but you can cut it down to a teaspoon. Also, are you adding oil to the bread, or just using it to oil the dough while it rises? You can cut the amount of oil to just what you need to oil the loaf, and probably not knead it a second time, or else try not oiling it when you leave it to rise. It’s just so it won’t stick to the bowl. Personally, I would be as sparing with it as possible, and not skip the second knead, then let the loaves rise at the very least 20 minutes. I bake baguettes, and they turn out pretty well.
Another thing to try is to start the yeast, and let it sit, then just before you begin to knead, add the salt.
That’s a lot of yeast for not much flour.
I switched to the recipe phal0106 linked to, and it came out picture perfect. Definitely the best yet!
But it’s still not very light. Still denser than I’d prefer. The crust is perfection though, I must say!
Next I’ll probably try a premium flour see if that helps any.
(Hubby isn’t so picky, he’s quite pleased with this incarnation!)
If it’s too heavy go through this list in order to try to fix it.
- kneed it more. google a windowpane test image. Get your dough to do that.
- let it rise longer. Under proofed is a large reason for dense bread
- Bread flour instead of AP, if your AP isn’t great quality go for bread flour.
- hotter oven. Get a better oven spring. You probably don’t need to lower the oven temp at any point. Home ovens aren’t that accurate. Just blast it.
- weigh your flour (you should do this anyway. It’s so important). Too dry dough won’t get good air holes. French bread you want a wetter dough than you would expect.
- incorporate an overnight proof. This will help with gluten development and cut down on how much you need to kneed. It also does other good stuff, it’s worth doing.
For the classical French baguette you need extra refined flour. I think that it is low in fats (although I am not sure). It certainly doesn’t have anything of the outer shell of the wheat grain.
In practical terms, you should try using the whitest wheat flour that you can find.
Using the least amount of oil, or maybe no oil at all, will also help.
Julia Child(blessed be her name) baked French bread with a combo of AP flour, and I believe pastry flour(2:1 ratio,IIRC) in order to approximate the lower protein of typical French flour.
Bought bread flour today, halving it with AP is my next tweak! Also going to change up the steam method to larger pan filled with already boiling water!
Now, on the real high heat thing, (which worked pretty good on the last effort, crust wise!), I was reading today that if you start at too high a heat it will crust too quickly and the crust can actually inhibit the rising–leading to denser bread. So I’m stil thinking that through.
Also read about ‘wetter dough than you expect’ so I’m going to definitely tweak that too!
When you say overnight rise, you mean the final rise, right?
Still a titch confused about whether kneading too long makes the bread softer or tougher. And what constitutes too long anyway? I’m sure I’m not doing anything near 12 minutes!
Thanks for all the tips, they are helping, without a doubt!
Look up the aforementioned windowpane test. If you can’t make your windowpane, you haven’t kneaded enough.
As for the heat, honestly you oven probably doesn’t get that hot. You can give the loaf a brush down with water if you are concerned.
The overnight rise should be the first rise. I do all my mixing by hand (I think it’s therapeutic) but the way I do it is:
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do the initial combination of ingredients and give everything a good hearty stir with a large wooden spoon until everything starts to pull together.
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let it sit for 10 minutes. This is called the autolyse. Do a Google search.
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do pour out the dough and kneed, mostly using the stretch and fold method. Also you can Google search this.
When the dough wants to stick to itself more than the board and can windowpane pull the whole thing into a ball by folding it under itself (Google forming a boule) and place it I to a well oiled very large bowl at the back of your fridge with plastic wrap that has been oiled placed on the bowl touching the dough so it doesn’t dry out. Leave it for up to 48 hours, at least 8, in the fridge.
Take it out two hours before you want to bake. Let it warm up and shape it after letting it warm for an hour. Let it rise until the shaped loaf doubles. Then score it, give it a wash (water, egg, nothing, whatever), and bake. Preferably on a preheated stone or baking sheet.
Thanks for all the pointers. I’m off to google window pane!
I have a gas oven and it DOES indeed get very hot, very quickly. I might start lower and go higher, rather than the reverse, and see what happens.
I’m surprised letting ‘rise overnight’ is the first rise, and that I leave it in the fridge! I’m glad you spelled it out, I’d have thought you leave it out, formed into loaves, (second rise) and pop them into the oven next morning. It’s confusing that it will rise in the cool fridge, to me!
Cold proofing is awesome, yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used for anything but the final rise.
However, you want a very active yeast culture if you’re cold proofing. That’s usually means using a starter.
Which you should be doing anyway, since you’re making a lot of bread, and also because you want tasty bread. 
You should take another look at the book your recommended. 
Reinheart is where I got the idea, he uses it a lot.
You likely know a ton more about baking than I do though so I will bow to your experience. I also agree that using a starter is better.
Yeah, when I have the foresight, I do my initial rises for up to several days in the fridge. I thought it was a fairly standard technique to develop flavor. Pretty much all the pizza dough recipes I work with insist on aging the dough for a day or two in the fridge, and the same with many bread recipes.
Fair enough, it’s been some years.
So, used half bread flour, added extra water, kneaded until passed the windowpane test!
(I have a good feeling!)
Yeah, it’s called a “cold ferment” if anyone wants to google it and learn about the technique.
This is definitely the recipe I’m sticking with to!
( It makes two cookie sheet length baguettes. Perfect for us!)
They came out really well and I’m very happy with them. The crust is much crumblier, and chewy, and the bread itself is much lighter. Letting it rise much longer really helped, I think.
Googled and read all about cold fermenting and I’m going to try that next. Just to be clear, when I reach the stage where it’s in a ball in an oiled bowl, that’s when I cover it and put it in my fridge, right? And when it comes out, I let it warm to room temperature and then form loaves, yes? When do I do the egg wash? Before setting it aside as loaves, to rise, or after? Slash the top just before baking, I think is right though!
I’m also going to try once using all bread flour, instead of half and half. See what difference that makes!
Thanks again for all your tips and encouragement. It’s like having personal tutors!