La Baguette Parisienne

Tales of Loaves and Fishes

This is a gothic tale of torture and woe, dogged persistence, and eventual near-redemption from deep in our ancient culinary history.

Once upon a time...

We'd just returned from a three-week winter jaunt to Paris, where every meal included a slice or two—or several more—of that French specialty, la baguette parisienne. We naturally included a baguette in our next LA shopping excursion, but it wasn't the same. The bread was a little too soft, and the crust was a shade too thin. Purists that we were, we decided that the only way to satisfy our true Parisian baguette lust was to make it ourselves.

The only problem? Neither of us had ever baked anything more complicated than a Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie. For ten years we'd been cooking on an ancient, 4-burner, 30-inch, GE gas stove with an oven we'd never once dared to heat up. The door insulation hung in ropes off the rim, and the window had long been glazed over with a permanent brown etching of burnt grease.

For several of those years, we'd put on a weekly feast for the neighborhood with never less than twenty guests and five to eight courses—but any baked dishes had to be finished in the modern Miele next door. Fortunately our "expertise" trended Indo-Chinese, so this rarely became an issue.

• So the first step involved hours of scrubbing and rinsing and somehow getting the insulation to stick again—more or less.

• And then we dove into our favorite French cookbooks—from Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire to the Le Larousse Gastronomique, to Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

• We brought in the bricks to line the oven bottom, and a spray bottle to mimic the action of a French steam oven.

• We sent away to King Arthur for several 5-pound bags of their superb (Blue) Bread Flour and SAF-Instant Red Yeast (along with a copy of their excellent Baker’s Companion).

• We visited our local French supply house for the metal baguette forms, a Carrera marble kneading slab, and an array of scrapers and temperature gages.

And then realized we had no idea what we were doing.

But you have to start somewhere, and so we dove into the kneading, rising, forming, baking, and spraying with all the gusto of the neophytes we were—and for the first two months, tossed every loaf into the trash.

That was sixty days and 240 loaves straight of abject failure, before we produced an edible hunk of bread.

The next sixty days went into getting the taste and texture to vaguely resemble the Parisian. By then, we'd realized one great truth of bread baking—namely that kneading is the perfect cure for impatience and and an affordable replacement for a therapist’s couch.

We'd also learned, in cooking as in wines, that terroir is everything. As tasty as the final product grew, it never quite arrived at parisienne. But along the way, we learned some seriously cool tricks and tidbits:

• The easier the bread dough is to knead, the more dry and tasteless the end product. Everyone wants to add too much flour, especially at first. The more you push back on this habit, the better the final loaf.

• Instead of sifting and measuring flour, you can just weigh it. A cup equals 4.25 ounces. So much easier.

• Yeast is a living organism. It sleeps in the freezer, and when it wakes up, likes warm comfort. Like us humans, it has good days and bad.

• Yeast hates salt with a passion and will shut down in a hissy fit if you don’t use distilled water and carefully disguise the salt in the flour. The salt is purely for taste.

• Yeast loves sugar and will hang around like a lazy glutton if you feed it too much. The sugar, like the salt, has little baking function and is added mainly for taste.

• Yeast spreads through the air in a warm kitchen and takes days to dissipate. The more you bake, the more this natural yeast chimes in, and the less new yeast you have to use.

• When it comes to baking, nothing produces an edible product quite like dogged determination.

But no matter. In the final sixty days, we knew we'd arrived when the neighborhood added the suffix BYOBaguette to every invitation sent our way.

The good news postscript:

After six months of struggle, we decided we’d justified buying a modern, hyper-expensive stove with all the baking bells. And so we did—a Viking Professional.

The bad news postscript:

We never baked another baguette. It wasn’t out of exhaustion either. We just decided that we’d made our point and had our fun, so we moved on and took up Salsa and Swing instead.

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Find an interesting guide and history of French bread here.

Whenever we cook French, we play our French music hall list, especially the inimitable Edith Piaf singing La Vie en Rose.

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