Baby Baguettes, from Erin Jeanne McDowell’s Savory Baking.
The recipe uses a pre-ferment – I subbed in 50 g. of unfed sourdough for flavor. Otherwise, I followed the recipe exactly for a half-batch of four small baguettes.
Erin’s process offers shortcuts to the making of an institutional baguette. While she can’t save you the anxiety of slashing room-temperature dough, she does offer alternatives to shaping and transfer of the baguettes, which are free-formed and proofed/baked on a sheet pan. No advanced shaping skills, couches or transfer peels required. I found them fun and relatively easy to make, and think her recipe rating of “difficult” here is undeserved. Baked with steam, the results were almost as good as the real deal, with far less of the angst.
Now that I have a visual on these, I’ll bake a full batch next time (tomorrow?) If I had a bigger baking stone, I would bake directly on a stone (using parchment and a pizza peel) and omit the sheet pan.
A side note: having made two out of two successful bakes from this book thus far, I’m encouraged to explore it more.
