Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Cookery School | How To Make Mini Baguettes | Waitrose

It's good! Hi, my name's Helen I'm a Chef Tutor here

at the Waitrose and Partners Cookery School.

Today I'm going to show you how to make baguettes - this is one of my favourite

recipes to make. I actually spent some time in my early

20s working in Paris and patisserie and I had to get up at kind of four

o'clock in the morning to go to work and this is the smell that would wake me up

so it's very nostalgic one for me. So we're going to start

by getting all of our dry ingredients ready together in a bowl. So we've got

some strong white flour, add 10 grams of salt. Next up is the

yeast, we're using an easy-bake yeast today.

You could substitute this for a dried active yeast that would require kind of

rehydrating and some water before you add it to everything else

and so if you wanted to substitute it for this recipe, you would use about

five grams of dried active instead of the seven gram sachet of easy-bake.

So to this we're going to make a little well in the centre and then we're going

to pour in 360 mls of tepid water and then we'll

start to work the dough together using a dough scraper, trying to

keep hands nice and clean for this initial stage.

It's a fantastic bread for beginners so it's a little bit simpler than the

traditional way of making baguettes which would require kind of overnight

fermentation. This is going to be kind of from mixing

to eating in under three hours which is a massive

advantage. Once everything's come together in a

mass like this, it's time to tip it out onto the bench.

I'm not going to dust it with anything as I don't want the dough to absorb any

more flour at this stage. Because it's so wet and sticky, we're

going to work it in a slightly different way so we're going to use our hands

kind of like forks to pick it up from underneath and then literally throw it

down, stretch it out and fold it in on itself.

This is definitely a place to take out some of your frustrations.

This can take anything from 5 to 10 minutes

and every so often you want to make sure that you're using that dough scraper to

just walk the dough around the bench and capture any bits

that might be starting to dry out and see if you can get it to be nice and

smooth on the surface.

If I were to run my hand under some cool water

and press into it gently, it's already springing back and another

good telltale sign is that you can see that curve against

the edge of the bench, so it's actually holding itself up a

little bit, that tells me that it's ready to start its first prove.

It's going to go in here and get covered until it has almost doubled in volume.

So my dough's been proving for about an hour now you can see that it's really

well risen. Time to roll these out. So a nice bit of

flour on the work surface to begin with. Once it's out of the bowl we're going to

kind of divide it up into eight, have a little check on the sizing - if you

can see that any are clearly bigger than others

you can fix that at this stage. So I now need to give them a little bit of

initial shaping and this is to build a bit of tension in the dough so that they

rise really well later on. So we want to make them into a nice ball

shape, best way to do this is to stretch the

outer edge of the dough and fold it in on itself and do this

all the way around the dough. Only put flour on the bench

but not on the top so that it can hold itself together once we once we do those

folds. And I'm just going to kind of press it

around on the bench a little bit, trying to develop a little bit of a seam

at the bottom so keeping a dryer piece of bench for this

without any flour on it is really helpful.

So while they rest I'm going to prepare what's known as a couche.

This is basically a flat well floured towel

and I'm going to line them up so we'll have eight baguettes running down the

tray like this and I need a little bit of overhang

because I'm going to fold it inwards as I go.

So from here I'll take some flour and just make sure that my towel is

really well dusted so that they don't stick, it's pretty

heartbreaking when you get this far and then you can't get them off the

towel. So the pre-shaped dough has now had an opportunity to relax and now we

can roll it out really easily so I'll start

with the first one. I'm basically going to press it out into a kind of

oval shape using the palm of my hand and then once

we've got this initial shape, I'm going to fold the top half

over and just press it into place. And then we'll turn it around do the

same with the other half and now we need to do the final shape by

folding the whole thing in half so I'm going to use my thumbs in the centre

and draw half of the dough over the top and then press into it

to create a seam. So from here we're going to kind of press

really firmly from the centre, even pressure as we go out and to about

the length of the tray that we're using and then to taper the ends it's all

about pressing the outer edges of your hands into the

dough. Now I'll try and find where that seam

was so I can put it at the bottom, I'll lay it on top of my couche and

just fold that towel up and the next one will sit right next to it.

I think you have to do it a few hundred times for it to be

um for it to feel really, really natural, um, but I think with bread making practice

practice makes perfect! So final ones going on the tray there so

they're sitting nice and snug. My baguettes have now risen for about 45

minutes so you can see that they're doubled in volume and they're ready to

go onto trays and be baked. So I've got a preheated oven ready for them to go into

and I'm just going to gently transfer them

by opening up the cloth and lifting from underneath.

So they are considerably more delicate now that they've been

proven a second time, there's lots and lots of air in there,

and once we've got them onto the trays we're actually going to score the

surfaces of them, using a serrated knife doesn't tend to

snag on the dough as much. I'm going to go for really long diagonal

cuts across the dough as deep as I can go in

one swift motion. The scoring is a really

important part of the process because it allows the dough to open out when it

goes into the oven, so we've got tons and tons of water in

there which is going to turn into steam and that needs somewhere

to go so baguettes can open up and be really nice and airy rather than

very dense and doughy. So they need to go into the oven at about 240 degrees or as

hot as your oven will go and it will take

anything from 12 to 15 minutes for them to develop a really nice

golden crust. For the full recipe click the link in the description.

So you can see that they've come out of the oven they took about 15 minutes and

the best way to tell if they're done is to look for the colour of them so you

want really nice golden, caramel crust. You

could give them a little tap on the base and that will tell you if it

sounds really nice and hollow then they're cooked all the way through.

Really good bread should speak for itself so I think the best way to serve

these is with a little bit of salted butter. So this is how I'm going to

eat mine, it smells absolutely unbelievable.