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Baguette with pâte fermentée: the recipe

Baguette with pâte fermentée

An intense crust colour, a cream-coloured crumb and a delicate hazelnut aroma — baguettes made with pâte fermentée let you develop flavour while simplifying production.

In this recipe the pâte fermentée is built from commercial yeast, but you can also use a piece of dough left over from a previous bake.

This method, like its twin based on poolish, gives you top-quality baguettes in a straightforward way. The poolish version, by contrast, thanks to greater enzymatic activity, makes the dough more extensible and the crumb slightly more open and airy, but using pâte fermentée offers a notable logistical advantage for managing the workload in a bakery.

This recipe is freely inspired by, or adapted from, a formula by Master Jeffrey Hamelman.

At a glance

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Ingredients

Quantities for 6 pieces of 340 g, kitchen at 21 °C

Preferment

  • Wheat flour (0, W320)298 g
  • Water197 g
  • Salt6.0 g (a teaspoon)
  • Yeast0.6 g

Dough

  • Wheat flour (0, W320)894 g
  • Water614 g
  • Salt18 g
  • Yeast6.9 g

Want to change the ingredients or use your own flour? The calculator redoes quantities and timing. Open the calculator

Method

  1. Pasta di riporto: make it and let it ferment (at room temperature) (14 hours)
    • Weigh the ingredients
    • Make a mix with 1 ice cube and 177 g of water at room temperature (to get it to 18 °C)
    • Dissolve the yeast in the water
    • Mix until you get a smooth dough
    • Seal it airtight (a lid, or plastic wrap pressed onto the surface)
  2. Weigh the ingredients and knead (25 min)
    • Use water at 23 °C
  3. End of mixing, start of bulk rise (at room temperature) (2 hours)
    Give it one reinforcement fold after the first hour.
  4. Reinforcement fold 1 of 2
  5. Reinforcement fold 2 of 2
  6. Divide/shape: weigh and form the pieces (10 min)
    • Divide into 340 g pieces, preshape into a round.
    • Let it relax for 10 to 30 minutes (longer if the preshape was tight), then give it the classic baguette shape.
    • Lay it between the folds of a linen couche, leaving room to expand, and cover with linen and plastic.
  7. Start of proofing (at room temperature) (1 h 15 min)
    Proof for 1 to 1h30 at 24 °C: If your kitchen is colder, an oven off with the light on helps.
  8. Ready to cook
    Score the baguettes before loading the oven.

Want to change when you start or when you bake? The calculator gives you the schedule with exact times. Open the calculator

Baking

    • conventional oven, with steam
    • Overall temperature: 240 °C
    • Time: 25 minutes
    • With steam

The calculator adapts baking times to the weight of your pieces. Open the calculator

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