No-Knead Bread Hack: How to

Shape a Baguette

Emma Christensen
Oct 1, 2010

From the very beginning, one of the things that we've loved about the no-knead bread is
how versatile it is. We can make it into a gorgeous and crusty round-loaf, a sandwich loaf,
and yes, even a baguette. Here's how we do it.

Since the no-knead bread is so loose and sticky, we find that it's much easier to work with
it if we can refrigerate the dough for at least an hour beforehand. We often make the
dough one day, refrigerate it overnight, and then make our loaves the next. It takes a
little planning, but results in a lot less headache - and better flavor!
When you're ready to shape the baguettes, sprinkle your counter with a little flour and
turn the dough out on top. Sprinkle more flour on top of the dough and knead it for a
minute or two until the flour is absorbed and the dough is no longer quite so crazy-sticky.
A dough scraper can help a lot with this step.
Shape it into a rough ball and let the dough sit for 15-20 minutes. This resting period
helps relax the gluten again after kneading so your baguettes don't spring back on you
quite so much while shaping.
While the dough is resting, spray a baguette pan with non-stick spray. Alternatively, form
a simple "couche," or cradle, for your loaves by rolling up 4-5 place mats and setting them
a few inches apart. Drape the rolls with parchment paper. Your baguettes will nestle
between the rolls, as pictured above.
Cut the dough into 3-4 pieces and shape each piece into baguettes following this method
for How to Shape Baguettes. If the dough starts to become too sticky to work with, coat

your palms in a little flour and continue shaping. Gently transfer each shaped loaf to your
pan or couche and cover them loosely with plastic wrap or a clean towel.
Let these rise until puffy, 45-60 minutes. Pre-heat your oven to 450 when you think
there's about 20 minutes of rising left to go. Timing this takes a little trial and error until
you get a feel for it, but better to err on the side of pre-heating too far in advance rather
than scrambling at the last minute. If you have a baking stone, make sure this is in the
oven while it pre-heats
Slash the tops of the loaves a few times just before putting them in the oven. Loaves in a
baguette pan can be baked directly on top of the oven rack or baking stone. If using a
couche, gently slip the rolled place mats out from under the parchment and slide your
loaves still on the parchment paper onto the back of a sheet pan or pizza peel. If you
have a baking stone, transfer the loaves directly onto this. If not, put the entire sheet
pan in the oven.
Bake the loaves 20-30 minutes, until they look deep golden-brown and feel light when you
pick them up (using oven mitts!). For an extra-crispy crust, spritz the oven with water 2-3
times during the first few minutes of baking using a spray bottle. Let the finished loaves
cool slightly, but baguettes are best while still hot from the oven.
Related: Baking Tools: Wear and Care for Your Baking Stone

How to Shape a Baguette Loaf

Emma Christensen
Mar 8, 2010

Crusty on the outside, chewy and soft in the middle - what's not to love about baguettes?!
It's hard to get a truly authentic French baguette in our home ovens, but we can get
mighty close. Try this method for shaping baguette loaves with any favorite bread dough
recipe - even the no-knead bread dough works quite well!

What You Need

Materials
1 batch of bread dough, like no-knead bread or basic white bread - makes 3-4 baguettes
Flour
Equipment [OR] Tools
Bench cutter
Baguette pan or couche

Instructions
Before Shaping: Prepare your bread dough and let it rise as normal. When ready to shape
the loaves, sprinkle your work surface generously with flour. Turn the bread dough out
onto the floured surface and use a bench cutter to divide the dough into three or four
equal lumps. Cover with plastic wrap and let the dough rest for about fifteen minutes
(this relaxes the gluten).
1. Sprinkle your work surface and one of the pieces of dough with more flour. Gently but
firmly, pat the dough into a rough rectangle approximately 10 inches by 8 inches. Make
sure the bottom isn't sticking and try not to deflate too many of those lovely air bubbles.
2. Fold down the top third of the dough and use the heel of your hand to seal the edge.
3. Fold the bottom third of the dough up and use the heel of your hand to seal the edge.
Steps 2 and 3 are like folding a business letter. If it feels easier, you can rotate the loaf at
this step so that you're again folding from the top down (as we did in the photo).
4. Use the edge of your hand to pat a crease in the middle of the dough and fold the
dough in half again. This will create a taut and smooth surface to the dough. Use the heel
of your hand to again seal the edge.
5. Sprinkle the work surface and loaf with a little more flour so there's no sticking. Use
the palms of your hand to gently press and roll the loaf into a long baguette form. Start
with your hands in the middle of the loaf and gradually move them to the outer edge of
the baguette as you roll. Roll until the baguette is as long as your pan or couche (usually
12-15 inches).
6. Transfer the shaped baguettes to a baguette pan or a homemade couche (see how in
this post) to rise. The loaves are ready to bake when they look puffy and ballooned.
Additional Notes:
As you work the dough, keep it moving. Use extra flour if needed to keep the dough
from sticking, particularly at the beginning and then when you roll the shaped loaf into
the skinny baguette.

 To replicate professional ovens as closely as possible, place a small oven-safe pan in the
bottom of the oven while it heats. Add a half cup of water or a few ice cubes to the pan
when you put the loaves in to bake. The steam will create a moist environment during the
initial few minutes of baking and help get a crackling crisp crust.
Baking the baguettes on top of an baking stone also helps get a great crust and cook the
loaves evenly.
Bake baguettes at 450 for 20-30 minutes, until the crusts are brown and golden.

Time Is on Your Side

Kneaded bread vs. no-knead bread is a false dichotomy. You should be
making slow bread.
By Benjamin Phelan

This takes patience.

Photo by Yelena Yemchuk/Thinkstock

aking bread has acquired a reputation as an activity best left to professionals. From the

historical perspective, this is a peculiar state of affairs. For thousands of years, we made bread
with no difficulty, cooking it in primitive ovens or even on hot stones. It was a vital foodstuff
from the moment of its discovery, around 6000 B.C., and for millennia afterward, in some

regions providing up to 70 percent of daily calorie intake. But now, even adventurous home
cooks who wouldn't blanch at buying a countertop sous-vide system or quail
at butchering a hog seem to believe that bread is beyond their powers and buy it from a store.
Bread-making, its assumed, is arcane and unrewarding, punishing minor lapses in technique
with dispiritingly thorough failure.
Perhaps the most fraught step in the bread-making process is kneading, in which the dough is
balled-up and flattened again and again. This develops the gluten, an opaque phase with a
forbiddingly scientific ring. Pretty much every English-language bread recipe ever published
tells you to knead your dough for 10 minutes or so before letting it rise. A notable exception in
this literature appeared in 2006, when Mark Bittman published Jim Laheys no-knead-bread
recipe in the New York Times. In the accompanying article, Bittman claimed that you could
make superior bread by forgoing kneading entirely. And indeed, Laheys recipe produced good,
characterful breadyeasty, chewy, and shaped like a bursting rugby ball. The recipe
inspired countless discussion threads on food sites and an inevitable backlash.
If you followed this conversation, Laheys no-knead bread came as a revelation. What a relief
the toil of kneading, whose point was never clear anyway, was a thing of the past. You might
have concluded, based on the spectacular results of the no-knead approach, that kneading was the
bakers primary site of inquiry and optimization: If you had figured out kneadingwhether that
meant doing it for 10 minutes or not at allyou had figured out bread.Ben Carson on CNN: Being Gay Is a
Choice

I am here to tell you that this notion is false. The most important part of the bread-making
process is neither kneading nor not-kneading, nor measuring with scientific accuracy, nor any
technique per se. The most important thing is to leave the dough alone for long periods of time,
over and over again, which is easy to do. Bread is doughs destiny, and bread-making is like
being a parent: Just as a child can be spoiled by too much interference with the natural processes
of time, to make good bread you must leave the dough to its own self-creation. The challenge is
internal: Can you suppress your need to fuss and fiddle, to make myriad tiny adjustments to a
dish before youre satisfied? It can be hard for some cooks (like myself), who feel like theyre
not cooking unless engaged in a frenetic, four-burner free-for-all. But if you can achieve some
measure of mastery over this inner, kitchen-destroying Tasmanian devil, you can make
excellent, bakery-quality bread, be it boule, baguette, or batarde, that you wouldnt hesitate to
purchase from a professional baker.
Leave the dough alone for long periods of time, over and over againthats it. Every single
step in the bread-making process is improved if it is followed by some period of sleeping,
watching TV, reading a magazine, writing an opera, etc. To see why this is the case, consider
how our prehistoric forebears discovered bread in the first place. First, they would have mixed
ground wheat with water to make gruel, dense and bland. If they cooked it right away, the result
would have been dense and bland. Better just to eat the gruel. But once they let the mixture sit
around for a while, it would have started to bubble and froth, slowly changing from an odorless
paste into a fragrant mixture of sugars and alcoholswhat we call dough. When cooked, heat
transformed the dough again, into something light, airy, and unexpectedly delicious. Our
observant ancestors would have had no idea why that initial mixture of flour and water started to

bubble as though alive, nor why it came out of the oven so radically changed. But they would
have realized that it only happened if they waited.
In the 19th century, we discovered that tiny fungi called yeasts were responsible for this
mysterious transformation. Nowadays, we use prepackaged yeast, from envelopes, jars, or,
rarely, cakes; unless we are making sourdough, we dont rely on yeasts in the atmosphere to
colonize our dough. The longer the yeast is allowed to ferment, the more complex are the flavors
in the finished loaf. Thats the first wondrous thing that happens if you take it slow.
As the yeast converts flours carbohydrates into flavor compounds and alcohols, it excretes
carbon dioxide, filling the dough with tiny bubbles of gas. These bubbles will form the inner
structure, or crumb, of your finished loaf. (Store-bought sandwich bread isnt allowed to rise at
its own pace and comes by its bubbles largely from industrial dough conditioners. Its crumb is
more like cake than bread.) Since structure plays a large role in delivering flavorotherwise, a
carrot would be indistinguishable from carrot juiceits important to let the bubbles grow for
quite a while, an hour or two, or four or five.
What happens when you poke a bubble? It pops. Every time you so much as jostle your dough,
you are poking your hard-won bubbles. So be gentle, because no matter how many hours of
fermentation and rising youve allowed, if dough goes into the oven deflated and flat, it will
come out of the oven deflated and flat, not to mention bland. Every time you do anything to the
doughintense manipulations such as kneading and stretching, but also simply emptying the
dough onto a countertopcover the dough and walk away for at least 15 minutes. Let it revive
and start to rise again before you do anything else.
The most psychologically demanding part of the process comes at the end. You have
allowed the dough a leisurely fermentation and rise. Perhaps you even left it in the fridge
overnight, bringing down the temperature and slowing the fermentation even more. You have
respected the bubbles. You have given the dough its final shape and are ready to put it in the
oven. But you can still blow it; disaster awaits unless you do one more thing. The thing is guess
what: nothing. You have to leave the finished, shaped dough alone for at least an hour, and only
then put it in the oven. This last waiting period is called proofing, in which the dough proves it
is still alive by starting to rise again, nearly doubling in volume. You will want to skip the
proofing, but do not, or there will be tears.
The only step that does not reward sloth is eating the finished bread. Most recipes seem to
recommend letting bread cool for an hour or more after taking it out of the oven, but this is the
height of perversity. After a brief cooling period, just long enough for the bread to finish cooking
internally, wait no more. You can eat good bread at room temperature in any bakery in the world.
There is only one place where you can eat it warm.
Rosemary Focaccia
adapted from Americas Test Kitchen
Time: 500 seconds of work, 116,100 seconds of sloth
Make the starter: Also, called a preferment, the starter is a chemically rambunctious mix of flour,
yeast, and water that creates much of the finished breads flavor. To make it, mix cup

unbleached all-purpose flour with teaspoon active dry yeast and 3 tablespoons warm water.
One concession to technique you might make is to fetch a thermometer from your medicine
cabinet and see that the water is between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature,
water feels barely warm to the touch, so your finger also works. Stir until uniform, cover with
plastic wrap, and leave undisturbed for six to 24 hours, or longer.
Finish the dough: To the starter add 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon active dry yeast, and cup plus 2
tablespoons warm water. Mix with a wooden spoon or in a stand mixer until uniform. The dough
will be very wet. Cover and leave undisturbed for a period called the autolyse (self-eating), in
which flour slowly absorbs water. Salt interferes with this process, so stir in about a teaspoon of
salt only after 15 minutes of autolyse, and then stir in another tablespoon or two of flour. Cover
with plastic wrap and leave it alone.
Rise, ferment, fold: Let the dough rise and ferment for as long as you likean hour, a few hours
while doing something else. Then dust the dough with flour and gently lift it out of the bowl
with floured hands. The dough will be very wet and hard to handle. Let it stretch, then fold the
dough over onto itself. Stretch and fold a few times. Return the dough to the bowl and re-cover,
then leave it alone for an hour or more. Repeat the stretch-and-fold step at least once, but as
many times as you like.
Shape and cook: Into a cast iron skillet or square baking dish no more than 12 inches across,
pour a generous amount of olive oil. Sprinkle in coarse salt and chopped rosemary. Empty the
dough into the dish; loosely form it into a ball; and coat it in the oil, salt, and rosemary. Cover
and leave it alone for at least 15 minutes, or as long as you care to.
With your fingers, spread the dough out to edge of the dish. If the dough resists, cover and leave
it alone for a few minutes before trying again. The dough should be lightly soaked in olive oil,
with small pools of it on the surface. If you are inclined, pop any very large bubbles on the
surface with a fork; otherwise they will swell enormously in the oven until paper-thin.
Turn the oven to 500 F. Cover the shaped dough with plastic and proof it, about an hour, while
the oven preheats. Lower the temperature to 450 F and bake until the focaccia is yellow-gold,
with some darker brown spots where the dough is highest, 20 to 30 minutes.
Let it cool briefly on a rack or dry cutting board before eating.