I found this over on Ars. It was put together by DemonYoshi .
From Yoshi himself:
I was off work yesterday and decided to try a new baguette recipe (from the King Arthur book), and did my best to document the process for Ars.
Step 1 was making the poolish. Poolish being a small amount of flour, water, and yeast left to ferment (for 14 hours in this case) so it can add flavor to the final bread. I didn't get a picture of this but got a picture of the ripe poolish.
Step 2 Was to measure out the ingredients for the rest of the dough. By weight as the recipe requested.
Step 3 I mixed the poolish and the rest of the ingredients together. It started out like:
Then when I left it to autolyse it looked like this:
Step 4 With the autolyse completed, I kneaded the dough some. And left it to rise, ending up like this.
Step 5 After letting the dough rise for about 2.5 hours with two folds in there somewhere, I divided it into three pieces:
Then I loosely shaped the three pieces and left them to rest so they'd be easier to shape later.
Step 6 Time to shape the pieces of dough. The first one got shaped into a mini-boule, sort of, and put in a cloth in a bowl to rise.
The second and third were shaped into baguettes.
Step 7 Time to slash the loaves, for looks and to let the dough expand more. The mini-boule got kind of a messy x shaped slash.
The first baguette got slashed, also a bit messily.
The second one got cut into an epi, a wheat ear type shape.
Step 8 Finally, time to bake. I preheated the oven with pizza stone at 500 for about 30 minutes, adding a cast iron pan part way through. Right before the loaves got added I microwaved a bit of water to almost boiling to pour into the cast iron pan and generate steam. I loaded the epi and baguette in, but didn't quite make room for the mini-boule so it had to sit out for a bit until the steam had dissipated. Anyway, the baguette turned out like:
The mini-boule like:
And the epi like this:
Step 9 After that I cut some of the baguette into thin little slices, and threw together some smoked provolone and bianco sardo. Topped both the cheese and the bread slices with a bit of basil, and stuck it in the oven. The slices came out wonderfully crispy and the cheese was perfectly melted and great.
Hope you had fun reading it, I had fun making and eating it 