There are many baguette recipes, many bad ones, many good ones. Here is one. From the many good ones I picked Brian’s. It’s easy, straight forward, and most importantly it makes really good baguettes!
Some notes from my side=> The poolish is essential! The poolish will give you the amazing taste. The water content you really need to ajust to your flour! 1% can make a difference. Very soft/sticky dough is not nice to work with and can be very difficult to shape. Keep a log and don’t switch flours. Brian said malt is optional, yes, true - but malt does make a big difference and will get you those nice big crump holes. I use 1.8%. Very important, it must be diastetic malt. That the very light colored one. If it looks like chocolate powder it’s the wrong one!
Brian explains pretty well how he shapes the baguettes and it’s easy to follow.
Ok, lets start….
So you want to make 3 baguettes of 250g each, here is what you need:
Poolish:
Flour: 120g
Water: 120g
A pinch of yeast
In case you use a different poolish/pre-ferment ratio, note the totals: Flour 469g and Water 281g
Main Dough
All of the poolish
Flour: 349g
Water: 161g
Salt: 9.4g
Malt: 0.0g
Yeast: 1.88g (dry yeast)
Mix the poolish roughly, cover it, let it rest in a warm place for 8~12 hours. You really just need a pinch of yeast. If it smells sour - it's good!
When the poolish is ready, mix all ingrediencies (including the poolish), add salt last, till smooth. -------- Will update it later. Please take the method from Brian's video.
Baking:
230°C/445°F Top/Bottom - with steam - 8 Minuten
200°C/390°F Top/Bottom - no steam - 8 Minuten
or if you have convection and steam:
245°C/475°F hot air - with steam - 3 Minuten
235°C/455°F hot air - no steam - 11 Minuten
That setting works well with the Anova APO.