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Baguette Recipe with Pate Fermente

The thing that makes baguettes and French bread so good is the pate fermente (or old dough). It’s what is called a preferment and it helps the dough get a good texture, taste and crust. You can make a pate just for the recipe you need, although it needs about 18 hours to really get to a usable stage, or you can just always hold back a apple-sized piece of dough to use as the pate. A pate fermente will last about 3 days in the fridge, so if you are a weekend baker, like me, just make the pate on Friday night and you can be baking with it on Sunday!

Here’s what the pate looks like. You make the dough, which is fairly dry, let it sit out covered for 30 minutes and then pop it in the refrigerator for at least 18 hours and up to 3 days.
Recipe:
1/4 cup of water at 80 degrees
3/4 cup of flour
a pinch of Rapid Rise yeast
a pinch of salt
Put the water in the bowl of your stand mixer. Attach the dough hook. Mix the flour, yeast and salt together and then add to the mixing bowl. Mix for 4 minutes. Put it in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it sit for 30  minutes. Then into the fridge!

When you are ready to use it, you break the pate up by hand and add it to the water in the mixing bowl.

Here’s the baguette recipe I like:
Put 1 and 3/4 cups of water at 90 degrees in a stand mixer bowl. Break the pate up by hand and put it with the water. Let the mixer run for 3 minutes to allow the pate to break down a bit.
Add 4 cups of flour
1 tsp of Rapid Rise yeast and
2 tsp of salt
to a bowl and shift by hand to blend the ingredients.
Add flour blend to the mixer bowl and mix for 4 minutes.

The dough will seem dry at first, but don’t worry. If, at the end of 4 minutes, the dough is still very dry, add 1/4 of a tsp of water to the dough. Mix for another minute and that should do the trick.

Put the dough in an oiled bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let it sit in a warm spot for 60 minutes. When the timer goes off, put the dough on a floured surface and fold it over in thirds. Put it back in the bowl, cover and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Put a floured cloth over a cookie sheet. Take the dough out of the bowl and put in on a floured surface. Cut the dough into two pieces. Roughly shape the pieces into oblongs. Now, take the ends and bring them to the center of the dough piece. Tuck the dough in just a bit and roll the dough away from you. Let the pieces sit on the counter, covered for 10 minutes.

Gently rock the dough back and forth, stretching the dough out as you go. 

Don’t be vigorous or anything, just gently stretching out. The dough should be 10 or 12 inches, with tapered ends, when you are done. Put them, seam side up, on the floured cloth.

Cover the dough with plastic wrap and let sit for 40-60 minutes. About twenty minutes before the end, preheat the oven to 500 degrees. Ten minutes before the end, put a pan with 3 cups of warm water under the baking stone.

When the timer dings, gently place the loaves on to the parchment paper covering your peel. Spray the loaves with water and let sit for 5 minutes. Make a cut down the middle of the loaves and spray them again.

Put them in the oven and reduce the heat to 475. Bake for 12 minutes. Then take out the water pan and remove the parchment paper. Rotate the loaves on the stone using your peel. I try to drag the parchment paper around on the stone as I take it out so that the paper does most of the rotation work for me. Let the loaves bake for another 10 minutes. Then place them on a cooling rack.

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One Response to “Baguette Recipe with Pate Fermente”

  1. emt training on June 18th, 2010

    nice post. thanks.

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