Week 2 Bake: Shaping and steaming baguettes

Four ingredients, a poolish mixed the night before, and the three things that decide whether a baguette opens in the oven

1 March 2027

Three baguettes, one bench, and no fat or sugar to hide behind. Everything you taste on Monday comes from flour, water, salt, yeast and what you did with time.

Before the session#

Mix a poolish 12 to 16 hours ahead: 150 g bread flour, 150 g water at 20 °C, and 0.15 g instant yeast — less than a pinch, so weigh it or scale a larger batch. Cover it and leave it on the bench, not in the fridge.

It should arrive domed, webbed with bubbles, smelling of cream and cider. A poolish that has sunk into a flat grey puddle fermented too far; bring it anyway, and taste the difference in the crust against someone else’s.

Bring a lame or a fresh blade, a linen couche or a clean tea towel, and a bench scraper. Read the week 2 lecture on scoring and steam before you arrive — the bench moves fast, and the geometry is easier to follow with dough in your hands than off a slide.

In the session#

The bench runs to the clock, four hours, in this order:

The half hour of autolyse buys back ten minutes of mixing: the flour hydrates and gluten begins to link up without any mechanical help, and the dough comes together smooth on a fraction of the work. Total hydration is 70%, salt 2%.

Shaping is the part worth slowing down for. You are not pressing the gas out — you are stretching a skin. Fold the cylinder over on itself, seal each fold under the heel of your hand, and roll out from the centre keeping that outer surface taut. Pinch the seam properly closed. The loaf proofs and bakes seam-down, so a seam that is merely laid shut unzips along the bottom in the oven, and the blowout takes the crumb with it.

Score at 20 to 30 degrees, the blade almost lying along the dough, about 5 mm deep, each cut overlapping the one before by a third. Steam for the first 10 minutes, then vent the oven and finish dry for another 10 to 12.

Afterwards#

Cut one loaf open while it is still ticking and photograph the crumb next to the crust. Write down which of the three failures you got: the seam that unzipped, a score made too deep or too vertical that tore flat instead of lifting, or a dull matt crust that set before the loaf had finished rising because the steam never arrived.

That note is the start of your evidence for bake-off 1, which is lean dough and nothing else. Week 3 and week 4 are the bench time you have left before it.