In the mid
1990s, while staying with my husband for six weeks in Horta on the Azorean
island of Faial, I had trouble finding good bread. The town was bustling with
European Union money--new houses, new jobs, new cars, trucks, and motorcycles. Before
this time most people baked bread at home, and the local bakeries hadn’t yet caught
up with demand. Our friend and my husband’s colleague, H, who lived in Horta,
had trouble too and would tip us off if she found a good loaf or a package of nice papa seco rolls somewhere. One
weekend we stayed across the channel on Pico Island at mutual friends’ vacant
cottage (it was just down the road from H and her husband’s cottage) where
I found a loaf of homemade bread in the freezer. I’m sorry to say we ate
the bread--it was delicious--and the only salve to my conscience was we gave
half the loaf to H.
Back in Horta I
tried a pizza-dough baguette recipe from Rosie Daley’s In The Kitchen With Rosie, but the yeast and flour were stale, the oven heat was irregular, and my baguettes failed to rise. We ate them anyway. When we
returned to Honolulu, I tried bread recipes by food writers Edward Espe Brown,
Cass Castagnola, Alain Coumant, Michael Pollan, Chad Robertson, Laurel Robertson
and Bronwen Godfrey, again Rosie Daley, and others. Slowly by slowly, I came up
with a recipe for baguettes that works for me. I hope it will work for you too.
To make four
cherry-pecan baguettes the ingredients are: 1 tablespoon dried yeast, 1
tablespoon honey, 1 tablespoon fine sea salt, 4 tablespoons olive oil, 2 cups whole-wheat
flour, 4 cups unbleached white flour, 1 cup full-fat Greek yogurt, 1 ½ cups water,
¾ to 1 cup chopped pecans, and ¾ to 1 cup dried cherries, soaked for 30 minutes
and drained well. You can use any nut or dried fruit you like, or for a savory
version perhaps rosemary leaves, Parmesan cheese, or chopped olives. Or you can
add nothing at all--the baguettes are excellent plain. You can also make them with
all white flour if you wish. They will be lighter, but still tasty and with a
nice yogurt-y tang.
Place the
yogurt in a large bowl and let it come to room temperature. Add to the yogurt the
yeast, honey, water, and two cups whole-wheat flour and mix well. Add the olive
oil and salt and mix again. Then add the unbleached white flour, 3 cups at
first, and the last cup as needed. Mix to form the dough, turn the dough onto a
floured board, and knead for 5 or 10 minutes, adding flour as necessary to keep
the dough from sticking. Roll the dough into a ball, put it into an oiled bowl, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap.
Let the dough
rise 1 to 1 ½ hours, or until doubled in bulk, then place it again on a floured
board. Knead the cherries and pecans into the dough (this may feel awkward--it
does for me--but just add the fruit and nuts little by little and work them in
as best you can; it’s hard to go wrong). Now with a knife or dough
cutter, divide the dough into four equal parts. Using a rolling pin or round-sided glass, roll each
part out to a roughly ½ inch thick rectangle, then roll up to form a baguette.
Place the baguettes seam side down on a large baking pan lined with oiled
parchment paper. With a sharp knife make crosswise slashes on the top of the
baguettes (some people recommend making the slashes right before putting the
bread into the oven, but when I did that my bread collapsed). Cover the
baguettes with a damp cloth and let them rise 20 to 30 minutes.
Bake in a preheated 450-degree Fahrenheit oven (or 425-degree convection oven) for 25 to
30 minutes. For a crisper crust, sprinkle the baguettes with water before
putting them into the oven, or place an empty pan below the baking rack and fill
it with a cup of water to create steam during baking.
Here is the
dough rising:
Here are the baguettes ready for the oven:
And fresh from
the oven and cooling on a rack:
