How to Shape Baguettes | Make Bread

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RECIPE: 470 g all-purpose flour, 285 g room temp. water, 12 g sea salt, 3 g fresh yeast, 235 g poolish. Combine ingred. except salt and yeast in bowl; stir w. hands. Let dough rest w. salt sprinkled on top for 1/2 hr. Transfer dough to work surface; knead in yeast and salt til dough passes windowpane test. Ferment 2 hours, punch down after 1st hour. Divide in 150g pieces for demi baguettes. Pre-shape demis; wait 15 min then shape. Let proof on couche for 1 hr.. Score then load on pizza stone in 500F oven. Spritz during first 5 min. then lower to 450F and bake 20 min. rotating as necessary.

All right, so the baguette dough has fermented for a total of two hours, with a turn at one hour. So now we’re going to divide the dough, and so we’re going to lightly dust our surface, scrape the dough out onto our surface. I’m going to shape this dough into two different shapes. I’m going to show you how to shape a traditional French baguette and then I’m going to show you how to shape demi-baguettes, which are smaller, about half the size, and fit more easily into your oven at home.

So for the French baguette I’m going to divide the dough into 300 gram pieces and for the demi-baguettes I’m going to use half that weight, so I’m going to divide it into 150 gram pieces. You can always eyeball this, but for me as a baker, weight really matters, both when you’re scaling out your recipe just in terms of consistency, and then also when you’re dividing, so things look more consistent.

If you find yourself making the same sourdough recipe or the same baguette dough recipe, and you’ve become so comfortable with it that you can just sort of eyeball the weights of things, and you know what the dough feels like, then by all means you don’t need to weigh anything out. But for me consistency is really important, and so I always weigh everything out, from the ingredients to the scaling of the dough, right before I shape it.

All right, so when I’m dividing; now that these are divided; I’m going to pre-shape them, and pre-shaping is the step right before shaping, and you’re pre-shaping, so that you can get an even and consistent final shape, that’s all. So if you’re shaping it into a ball, you really don’t need to do a pre-shape. But when you’re shaping it into a long baguette, you want that baguette to be even, and so you want to do some type of pre-shaping, so that the final shape is even.

So the first thing I do is that I take a bread board here and you could also use your kitchen counter or just something that you can flour, and let the bread sit on it for about 15-20 minutes. So I’m just going over the board with some flour and now I’m going to take my baguette piece and I’m going to roll it up, like I’m making a log, and that’s all that I’m doing with this pre-shape, is I’m rolling it up and I’m making a log, and that will become my final baguette shape.

I’m not putting a lot of tension on this, although you could. But I’m just sort of rolling it out, just so it’s nice and even. Now for the demi-baguettes my pre-shape is round and so I’m going to round this dough. And so again, I am flouring my hands, because this is a little stick, and that’s okay. And I’m going to take against the surface that I’m working on, and sort of round and use that friction to create a nice ball, and I’m going to work two at a time.

And then these balls are going to rest along with the baguette oblongs for about 20 minutes and we’re letting them rest, because we want the gluten to relax. And you might find as a beginning baker that your dough is already soft enough or relaxed enough, for you to shape it into a baguette and that’s great. Really for a professional baker, who puts a lot of tension in the dough, you need to let that gluten relax, before you can do the final shape.

The rolling here for example, is really working the gluten, and so if I tried to shape this into something else right now, I wouldn’t be able to so I need to let it relax. So that’s dividing and pre-shaping baguette dough. We’re going to let this relax, and we’ll come back to it in about 20 minutes. So I’m going to show you how to shape a baguette, and then I’m going to show you how to shape demi-baguettes.

So I’ve moved all of my pieces of dough on to my board, so I would have more space, but you don’t necessarily need to. I’ve gotten myself set up, so I’ve got a row of flour right in front of me. I’ve got my work space where I’m going to shape my baguette. I’ve got my bench knife, which is really important in shaping. And then I’ve got what is called a couche, which is a French word. It’s a verb, it means couche which means to sleep.

And basically, I’ve rolle