If you were at the Chicago Green Festival Sunday afternoon, welcome to my blog! {waving wildly} And if you weren’t there, well, you still get to check out the French bread recipe that I demonstrated. This is a super easy bread and one of my favorites! For each baguette, you need the following ingredients:
1 cup warm water (bath temperature)
1/2 tablespoon yeast
1 teaspoon salt
2-3 cups unbleached flour
If you were at the Green Festival, you know that some of these instructions are merely suggestions — you can bake bread with little or no salt (but it’s going to taste different than what you’re used to), and you know that if the water isn’t quite warm, it will just take longer for the bread to rise. But bread happens! If you put water, yeast, and flour into the same bowl, mix a little, it’s going to turn into something that resembles some kind of bread.
So, put the first three ingredients into a bowl, as well as two cups of flour. Once you get that mixed up as much as you can with a spoon, put down the spoon and dig in with both hands. As long as the dough sticks to your hands, add flour about 1/4 cup at a time. Mix it thoroughly, and if it still sticks, add another 1/4 cup. Once it’s all mixed up, you can let it rise for a bit, or you can shape it into a baguette, let it rise for about half an hour, and bake it for 20 minutes at 400 degrees. For a crunchier crust, you can spritz it with water before baking, but it will still make a perfectly good baguette without spritzing.
Feel free to double or triple if you’d like more than one loaf. Happy baking!
This recipe seems so EASY! (and that's definitely my style). I just bought some yeast last week to start experimenting with breads and I'm going to let my maiden run into breadmaking begin with these baguettes. 🙂 Thanks for sharing this recipe!
Thanks for the recipe. Will bookmark it! :o)