The bread of France, four ingredients and a long cold ferment worked into a thin crackling crust and an open, cream-coloured crumb, and by law nothing else in it at all
Origin: Paris and Northern France
From the journey of Wheat.
The baguette de tradition française is defined by law. A decree of 1993 states that it may contain nothing but wheat flour, water, salt, and a leavening agent, that it may not be frozen at any stage, and that it must be made on the premises where it is sold. The rule was written because the ordinary baguette had been ruined by industrial speed, and it is the reason the good ones came back. UNESCO added the artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread to its list of intangible cultural heritage in November 2022. The long loaf is far younger than most people assume. French bread was round for most of its history, the big miche of the village oven, and it stayed round because a round loaf keeps better. The thin stick is a creature of the city, of daily rather than weekly baking, and of a working population buying bread twice a day; it took its present shape between the 1830s and the 1920s. The steam oven is the part of that story that can be pinned to a person. In 1839 an Austrian named August Zang opened the Boulangerie Viennoise at 92 rue de Richelieu in Paris and sold Viennese bread baked in ovens that injected steam into the chamber. Steam keeps the surface of a loaf soft through the first minutes of the bake, letting it expand fully before the crust sets, and it is what makes a thin, high-rising, crisp-shelled loaf possible at all. Zang brought the kipferl with him too, which Paris turned into the croissant, and then he went home to Vienna and founded a newspaper. A great deal of French baking is owed to a man who was not a baker and did not stay. The story you are most likely to be told is that the baguette was invented in 1920, when a new law forbade bakers to work between ten at night and four in the morning and left too little time to prove and bake a round loaf before breakfast. The law is real, which is why the story has such a long life: night work genuinely was restricted and it genuinely did reshape the Parisian baker's day. The difficulty is the sequence. Long Parisian loaves are documented decades earlier, and Steven Kaplan, who has spent a career on the history of French bread, is sceptical of the causal link. What the legislation of 1920 did was set weights and dimensions for a loaf that bakers were already selling, and give it an official name. The tales of Napoleon's soldiers carrying bread down their trouser legs and of Métro navvies needing a loaf they could tear without a knife are folklore outright. What makes it work is a technique rather than an ingredient. A slow, cold fermentation, often overnight, develops flavour that a fast dough never gets, and a high proportion of water gives the open irregular crumb. The scoring, the grigne, is not decoration: the cuts direct where the loaf will burst as it springs, and a baker is judged on them. France mills its wheat differently too. The T-numbers on French flour measure mineral ash, which is a proxy for how much of the grain's outer layers survived, and a tradition baguette is made from T65: rather less refined than a standard British or American white flour, which is a large part of why it tastes of something.
T65 flour is worth seeking out from a specialist supplier. Strong white bread flour works and gives a very good loaf; plain flour does not have the protein to hold the structure. The dough is about 72 per cent hydration, which is wet by domestic standards. Wet hands rather than more flour is the way to handle it. For a pain de campagne, replace 100 g of the white flour with wholemeal or rye and shape as a round. The single most common fault is under-baking. A pale baguette is a soft one, and the colour is the flavour.
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