30 Minutes (okay 60 minute) Baguettes

Because of my current (and holding) lack of employment, I feel the need to be an awesome homemaker. This involves doing things like shining the kitchen floor (did it this week) and making awesome dinners. Tonight, the Riner household was super fortunate to have friends in town - the Acrees and my very own Hillbean are hanging out here this weekend. So for the occasion of meeting sweet baby Naomi Acree for the very first time, I decided we needed a killer dinner.

And it shall be chicken and dumplings. I even made my own stock. But the dumplings were bisquick (because you cannot possibly make better dumplings than bisquick dumplings).

But that's not even what this post is about. This post is about my second attempt at making bread...and not of the pumpkin or banana variety (which, if we're honest, is just calling cake "bread" so that we feel better about eating copious amounts of it).

Pinterest has become quite the problem - there are far too many delicious looking recipes that I think I can do. So I came across this pin today for "baguettes made in about 30 minutes using only 5 everyday ingredients."

Anytime something says it will take "about 30 minutes," you should translate that into "this will take you at least an hour if not more."

So I set out to make the 30 minutes baguettes.

Luckily, I had a package of yeast. So I did the whole yeast-in-warm-water-with-sugar-thing that is fairly standard. I have done this before (e.g. my first attempt at making bread several weeks ago), and I noticed this time that the yeast was not as frothy as maybe it should have been after the required resting time. Oh well. Carry on.

The next step is the tricky part. I remembered from my first attempt at bread making that you cannot trust a recipe when it comes to making dough. Oh the recipe may say 4 cups of flour, but it really means 6. Apparently it depends on a lot of factors including the temperature, humidity, the alignment of the stars, and how the Gamecocks are doing in football. Don't ask me how much flour I used for this dough - I stopped keeping track. Apparently it needs to be soft but not sticky. That is fairly subjective.

This is my dough. It was indeed sticky - which makes it very hard to clean off of the counter. I added more flour and let it rise for a about half an hour. It rose maybe .0003 of an inch. Unimpressed. I think this relates back to the whole non-frothy yeast thing.

Mallie was unimpressed.

I chose to move forward with the height-challenged dough, and turns out, I think it might make it. The next step is dividing the dough into four parts, making snakes with smaller sections of dough, and twisting them together. This was super fun. Maybe I should invest in some playdough.



Okay, this is the crazy part. When you put the twisty snakes into the oven, you put a dish of ice underneath of it. Apparently the steam makes the crust...well...crusty. Unfortunately, we have no ice maker and only two ice trays. So basically, we would get to enjoy our crusty bread with lukewarm beverages for the rest of the evening.



18 minutes later...TA-DA! So they don't look exactly like the original picture, but it tastes pretty darn good. I know what I would do differently next time...starting with maybe giving the yeast a talkin' to before we get started, but I think it was a fairly good second attempt at breadmaking. And I really think I could do it much more quickly next time. Should you wish to attempt such feats in 30 minutes or less, here is the link to the recipe: http://blogs.babble.com/family-kitchen/2011/02/21/crusty-baguettes-made-fresh-in-30-minutes/. Best of luck!