I made baguettes for the first time yesterday, purely on a lark, out of the pantry, because I was making coq au vin for dinner and my copy of the Tartine book on the shelf happened to catch my eye.

Bread is always a side quest challenge and not a destination for me, where the main course pairing and some time to kill is more motivating than actually having the bread.

As in, when I’m on a cut (a fat, protein, carb, and fiber oriented caloric deficit practice using scales and calculators), I pretty easily fall into carb deficiency and have to force myself to bother to eat enough carbs, usually as rice, to sleep comfortably.

That said, I maintain a nameless from-scratch starter and have a large deli container of SAF instant yeast on hand, and a pantry full of various types of flour, so I kinda lay this trap for myself.

I would have preferred a longer, skinnier loaf but this is how big my baking steel is. The slashes should also have been deeper, and my shaping leaves a lot to be desired. I cannot use my ample sized neapolitan-style pizza oven for bread like this because bread like this springs best in steam.

I have no idea which setting on my fancy kitchen oven is best for this kind of thing. Aero bake? Bake? The rear loaf got darker on the top than the loaf in the front. My razor slashes were definitely too shallow, and I think I degassed the dough too much in my clumsy shaping, and so the crumb was tight.

But what the hell do I know, I don’t really eat baguette and I associate the style more with that scene from Michael Clayton ( https://defector.com/tom-wilkinson-and-his-baguettes-are-eternal) more than any experience or style guide.

Tom Wilkinson And His Baguettes Are Eternal | DefectorThe baguettes are central. I mean this literally. My (very legally procured, if anyone asks!!) digital copy of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton—the film in which the mentally ill character played by the late actor Tom Wilkinson carries a medically inadvisable number of baguettes into an impromptu confrontation with his titular friend and handler, the last…defector.com (opens in a new tab)

All that nonsense aside, this recipe (and I guess most modern ones) calls for using both a from-nature starter in a levain, and a from-commercial-yeast starter in a poolish, which is just cute as a snapshot of industrialization.

I’ve overheard bakers and pizza makers at IRL places I enjoy explain to questioners that is their proven approach as well, and I really need to get down to firming up pizza dough recipes that build on the same approach to get my dough to the next level.

It is funny to make all of these observations to myself when someone tries my baking or cooking, and only to hear “oh don’t be hard on yourself, this is great" or something like that.

To be super clear, if you find yourself in that kind of conversation: thinking about what to change about next time about some craft and critiquing output the craft is the entire point of doing the craft. It isn’t a self-esteem thing, if anything, is quite the opposite.

I used to make beer all the time. When the last year or so of batches was all, to my mind, commercial quality, I ran out of things to care about and lost all motivation for making the stuff. It became a big chore of doing dishes and collecting ingredients instead of a way to occupy my mind with a simple challenge of one or two things to improve right next time.

In a way very real way, that’s what hobbies are for, to me. I’m just not gonna be explicit about it.

“check it out, I successfully tricked my brain into not being a dick for like six hours today doing this.”

I’m also very jealous of the memorization gang who can put their mind to the gear in every hobby. That probably works really well. I can never remember, and could not care less about gear, parts, model numbers, and attributes.

It’s process or nothing with me.

Anyway, the bread was incredible with dinner and now I’m gonna make french toast with it, which I just wing every single time.