Attempting a French Baguette, oui? Day 1

French baguettes. I can’t tell the difference between them and a rustic loaf other than shape so lets do this.  Once again I am taking my culinary education from Baking Illustrated. I’ve read the recipe about five times. For whatever reason the timings of resting the bread, refrigerating the bread and honestly, I’m not sure what else. All I knew was there were a lot of hours and times to remember and I was just not adding it up. (side note: from what I learned so far – if there are problems in your baking, blame the math) Thus far, the first day is just making the sponge (or biga) and the second day is when you get into all the hard work. Since I wasn’t entirely sure what the deal is with this bread I decided to not make the sponge after dinner. Today I started at 1pm. You might call this luck. I prefer to call this subconscious genius.