French Baguette Class at King Arthur Flour

French Baguettes with straight scoring, one sided epi and traditional epi.

This weekend my boyfriend and I traveled up to Vermont, where I took some classes at King Arthur Flour.   We worked from their French Baguette recipe. 

They made and measured out the poolish for us in advance.  Then had us mix the dough by hand.  Now, I confess that I mix almost all of my bread dough in a Kitchen Aid Mixer- and almost never mix by hand.  I do a lot of my kneading in the mixer as well – so this forced me to think and work differently (always a good thing). 

The recipe made very wet dough, which we then kneaded by hand using a rapid slap-and-fold method that she demonstrates in the video below.  

King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center Folding Wet Dough from Deborah Szajngarten on Vimeo.

After kneading until partial gluten development, we left the dough to rise while we worked with pre-made dough on shaping and scoring.  Their method was slightly different from Peter Reinhardt’s method in his craftsy class, and it took some getting used to before I felt comfortable with it.  You can see it in the video below.  

Dough shaping techniques from King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center from Deborah Szajngarten on Vimeo.

Finally we worked on scoring.  Much like shaping, scoring is one of those techniques that just takes a lot of practice.  I felt a lot more comfortable with the scoring than I did with the shaping.   In the end, we turned out some beautiful loaves.

Shaped loaves