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I don't follow a recipe when making french bread.

That is to say, I don't measure predetermined numbers of cups of ingredients to make one batch of dough. I use a percentage.

French baguettes (or demi-baguettes, as shown above) are made from lean dough, which means they are made from only four ingredients:
- Flour
- Water
- Salt
- Yeast

To work out what quantities of these ingredients to use, you use what's called the baker's percentage. It's all about the flour.

Everything is expressed as a percentage of the four.

This baguette was made with a 75 per cent hydration lean dough. So for every 100 grams of flour that is used, 75 grams of water is used. I also use 2 percent salt and 1 percent yeast. So that turns out to be 2 grams of salt and 1 gram of granular yeast per 100 grams of flour.

To make this bread, I poured a glass of water in my bowl and weighed it. I divided that weight by 0.75 and added that many grams of flour. I multiplied that weight by 0.02 and added that many grams of salt and divided that number by two to know the quantity of yeast.

So, in this case, the dough was made with
533 grams of flour (100 %)
400 grams of water (75 %)
11 grams of salt (2 %)
5 grams of yeast (1%)

I usually stretch and fold the dough to develop it.