Simply enjoy food

There are many ways to turn dough into nicely shaped breads. Here are the steps I follow that seem to work for me.

First, I start with the right portion of dough.

Then I flatten it out a little, without degassing it too much.

To make baguettes or baguette-type breads, I roll it up. I make sure to tighten the skin so that the bread will become round when it bakes.

Then I will rock and roll the dough to stretch it out into the final shape. I lay them on parchment paper.

I let it proof for the required time. Usually 30 minutes for room-temperature dough and about 60 minutes for dough that has come out of the refrigerator.

Then I score the dough or otherwise shape it. Here I am cutting it with scissors to make an épi shape.

Into the oven they go at high heat with steam.

Final result:

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.