At 11:00 p.m., when many of you are getting ready for bed, the Wedge
Bakehouse team is just starting their day. The Wedge is the only co-op in the Twin Cities with an on-site bakehouse and a team of night-owl bakers with
an appreciation for Old World methods and a flair for contemporary tastes.
We bake from scratch every day-no mixes, no preservatives, no artificial
ingredients or dough continuers-so you can enjoy a little slice of heaven, knowing that it’s wholesome, too.

For the past few months, the Wedge Bakehouse team, led by Tim Kastner,
have been developing and testing a new baguette recipe that launches
in early September. Tim takes pride in his work and knew it was time to
produce the highest-quality, best-tasting baguette in the Twin Cities. So he spent weeks testing a number of new flours and conducted, to the staff’s delight, internal taste tests to land on the perfect recipe.

The new recipe uses patent flour, which is the purest and highest-quality wheat flour available and is made from the center portion of the wheat kernel. The bread is also started from a “poolish” or sponge, which is a mixture of flour, water and a pinch of a sourdough starter rather than instant yeast.

With these changes, we now believe we have the best baguettes in town.
This new recipe will be used to make our mini baguette, French batard and
epi baguette. Get them while they are hot in aisle seven!

How to Make the Wedge Baguette

Day 1

• Make a poolish

Day 2

• The poolish is a bubbling mass of aromatic, yeasty
  goodness.
• Mix the dough by adding the flour, water and poolish
  together. Let the dough sit for 30 minutes. This allows
  the flour to fully hydrate, the gluten proteins to form
  and the enzymes in the flour to begin breaking down
  starches into simple sugars.
• Adding a small amount of yeast and salt and then
  doing more mixing to develop the gluten finishes
  the dough. The dough then ferments in bulk bins in
  a refrigerator overnight. This long fermentation time
  produces more flavor and develops a deeper color
  from the hard, red wheat.

Day 3

• Divide the dough and shape it into baguettes. They
  “proof” or rise until doubled in size, and then they go
  into to hearth oven.
• The oven is lined with thick ceramic tiles that retain
  heat and give the dough good bottom heat. Steam
  is injected into the oven to soften the dough’s
  surface, giving it more time to expand before it sets.
  The steam also gives the crust a nice shine, and upon
  finishing baking, is what makes the crust crisp and
  crunchy. The oven is set at 500°, so it doesn’t take
  long to bake a batch.
• The finished bread cools on wire racks before they are
  stocked for you in the artisan bread case.