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Pain à l'ancienne — "old-fashioned bread" — is my favourite way to coax huge flavour and a wildly open, blistered crumb from a baguette, with barely any shaping at all. The whole trick is delayed fermentation: you mix the dough ice-cold and let it ferment slowly overnight in the fridge, so the flour has hours to develop a deep, sweet, almost nutty flavour before the yeast really gets going. The next day you barely touch it — just cut, stretch and bake. It's the same Shipton Mill flour and the same two-stone bake as my standard baguettes; only the fermentation changes.
Ingredients
- 500g Shipton Mill strong white flour
- 360g ice-cold water (72% hydration) — I use cold water with a few ice cubes stirred in to bring the temperature right down
- 100g active starter, at its peak (straight from the fridge is fine)
- 10g fine salt
To finish
- Fine Shipton Mill semolina, for dusting
Method
- Mix it ice-cold: Whisk the starter into the ice-cold water. Add the flour and mix to a shaggy dough, then rest 20 minutes. Add the salt and squeeze and fold until smooth. The whole point is to keep everything cold — the ice water holds the dough temperature right down so fermentation crawls rather than races.
- A little strength: Over the next 45–60 minutes at room temperature, give the dough 2–3 gentle stretch-and-folds to build a bit of structure — just enough to hold the gas.
- Cold ferment overnight (the flavour step): Cover and put the whole bowl straight into the fridge for 12–18 hours — the fan-assisted fridge is ideal. This slow, cold fermentation is where all the flavour comes from. By morning the dough should be risen, bubbly and aromatic.
- Take the chill off: Leave the dough out for an hour or two until it's relaxed and even more bubbly, but still cool to the touch — cold dough is far easier to handle for this.
- Turn out & cut — don't shape: Generously dust your surface with semolina. Gently tip the dough out into a rough rectangle without knocking the gas out of it. Now simply cut it into 3 long strips with a bench scraper — no pre-shape, no tightening. Keeping all that gas trapped is exactly what gives you the open, irregular crumb.
- Gently stretch: Pick up each strip by the ends and gently stretch and coax it to baguette length, then lay it on a sheet of semolina-dusted parchment paper. Handle it as little as humanly possible.
- Score 3 times: Holding a sharp blade at a low angle, make three long, shallow, overlapping cuts down the length of each baguette, each slightly offset from the last (see our scoring guide).
- Bake (my usual baguette setup): Bake between two pizza stones — one for the baguettes to sit on, and a second on the shelf above to reflect heat back down. Preheat both as hot as the oven goes (250–260°C) for 45 minutes. Slide the baguettes in on their parchment, add steam, and bake 20–25 minutes until deep golden and crackly, and the internal temperature reaches ~98°C.
- Cool & listen: Cool on a wire rack — you'll hear them crackle and sing. Eat the day you bake.
Tip: The colder the dough, the better — it's easier to cut and stretch, and it holds more gas for a more open crumb. Don't rush the overnight ferment either: those long cold hours are doing all the flavour work, with no kneading and almost no shaping from you.
That deep, slow-fermented flavour starts with a lively culture. Ours is live, organic and ready to bake in 2 hours.
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