How a Baguette Gets Its Crunch
A fresh baguette is hard to miss. Long and slender, with a golden crust and a soft center, it might stick out of a paper bag on the way home from a French bakery. But how do a few simple ingredients become a loaf with such a crisp outside and airy inside?
From dough to loaf
A traditional French baguette begins with flour, water, salt, and yeast or a natural starter. Yeast is a living organism that feeds on sugars in the dough and releases a gas called carbon dioxide. As the dough rests, pockets of gas collect inside it, helping it rise.
Mixing and folding the dough helps develop gluten, a stretchy network formed from proteins in wheat flour. Gluten helps hold the gas bubbles in place. If the dough is handled carefully, some of those bubbles remain even as the baker shapes it into a long loaf.
The baker lets the shaped dough rise again before baking. Then, just before it goes into the oven, the baker makes several quick cuts along the top. These cuts, called scores, give the expanding loaf places to open as it bakes. Without them, the crust may split in less predictable spots.
The crust and the crumb
- slender:
- Long and thin.
- organism:
- A living thing.
- network:
- A group of connected parts.
- flexible:
- Able to bend or change shape without breaking.
- textures:
- The ways things feel when touched or eaten.
- intangible:
- Not a physical object that can be touched.
- heritage:
- Traditions and skills passed from one generation to another.
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Preview questions from this passageShowHide
- 1How do yeast and gluten work together to help baguette dough rise?
- 2Why does a baker handle the dough carefully while shaping it?
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About this explanatory article passage for Upper Elementary
“How a Baguette Gets Its Crunch” is a explanatory article reading passage about French Bread, written for Upper Elementary. It takes about 3 minutes to read (501 words) and comes with an interactive quiz and a printable worksheet with comprehension questions and an answer key.