It would appear that the art of shaping a baguette is beginning to fade. With the pressures on bakery owners to increase volume and decrease labor costs much equipment is being brought into the bakery with these goals in mind. A baguette, even a well made one, is often one of the cheaper items in a bakery’s list of offerings, and often it commands the highest volume in a typical retail/wholesale bakery. Given these factors it is quite common for even an ‘artisan’-style bakery to bring in equipment to streamline their production. A divider is purchased to eliminate the time consuming cutting and weighing of the dough. A molder takes the divided pieces and rolls them either into the finished baguette shape or to an intermediate length which is then finished by hand. Both of these pieces of equipment, while speeding production, degass to a great extent the dough, resulting in a tighter, less open crumb structure.

So in an effort to promote the craft of hand-shaping a baguette the following text and photos, hopefully, will, if not preserve as an artifact of a by-gone time, help illustrate the proper technique of shaping a baguette.

To begin: the dough is divided, often at 14oz, and is loosely ‘pre-shaped’ into a round and allowed to relax, covered, on boards. In the first picture you find one of these rounds that has been gently de-gassed into a rough rectangular shape and is folding inward by thirds. This whole process is done gently. One could certainly degas the dough by hand as completely as with a divider (perhaps even more given that today’s equipment is designed to be as easy as possible on the dough) so while we are making the extra effort to shape by hand we must be thinking: gentle.

Once the dough is folded over to form a long, narrow rectangle the seam that is exposed is pinched closed by using the ball of one’s hand and compressing the seam against the wooden surface of the table. Next, as seen in the following photo, the hands are placed, overlapping one another in the middle of the dough and, with a rolling action, the dough is lengthened as the hands separate and move along the length of dough. One must pay particular attention to the elasticity of the dough. You can feel the resistance to your lengthening in the muscles of your hands and arms. If the dough is resisting too much, stop the lengthening action and set the piece aside to rest while you begin work on another.

As you see in this picture the rolling-stretching action of shaping causes the ends of the baguette dough to bulge as excess gas and dough is pushed to the ends. The final action of the shaping process tapers these ends to a fairly fine point. You do not want to leave the ends bulbous as they will expand in the oven and be particularly unsightly after the bake.

You may end up rolling the dough a couple of times. You will stretch the dough out past its desired final length knowing that the natural elasticity of the dough will cause it to relax back to a point that is shorter once you lift your hands from the table. As we know, dough is a combination of elastic and extensible properties. These two properties allow us to shape a dough into a variety of shapes while still maintaining enough strength to maintain that shape over time during fermentation. A dough that lacks extensibility will be difficult to shape into any shape and particularly difficult to shape into a baguette. Without an extensible characteristic the dough might tear, and it will prevent the crumb from opening up during the rise. If too extensible the dough will be slack on the shaping table, it will not hold its shape and will lack volume.

Once the dough has been shaped it is placed on linen which sits on boards. Folds are placed between the shaped dough to prevent them from sticking to one another. Once the dough as reached it’s proper rise, the ready to bake dough is removed from the linen using a rolling action that places the dough onto a hand peel where it is then transferred to either the loader (if one is being use) or a large peel used to load the bread into the oven.

The final stage before the dough is loaded into the oven is the slashing of the dough. As the dough bakes it will continue to rise (known as oven-spring). As the outer edge of the dough sets and begins to form a crust it can tear as the inner portion of the dough continues to expand. The solution to the misshapen loaf that would sure result from this occurrence is to cut the dough at key points to control where the loaf will split. For a baguette the traditional method is to slash the top with a lame in 7 (traditional, less elsewhere) overlapping lines. It is often stated the slashes should overlap by 1/3. These cuts are not straight into the dough but, rather, at a relatively flat angle towards the inner part of the loaf. This action is demonstrated in the next picture.

Finally the loafs are loaded and baked with steam to a deep mahogany color. If well executed the cuts along the top will open up exposing a lighter colored interior, a tan middle area, and an almost burnt-brown top.

If the shaping went well you should find a creamy interior (the result of good mixing practices) with an open and irregular crumb structure.

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