Ascorbic acid

The best baguettes I've made are with King Arthur� Flour. But unfortunately, it's pretty expensive to begin with, and on top of it, they only sell it by mail. But all it is according to the package is unbleached all purpose flour with a little whole wheat and ascorbic acid.


As far as adding ascorbic acid to bread dough is concerned, this guy suggests:

"1/8 tsp per 3 cups of flour of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C in its raw form). You can purchase this at any larger health food store. This ingredient is used by commercial bread bakeries and stabilizes the dough, preventing it from flattening."

But he's talking about sourdough.

The UK's Flour Advisory Bureau says "Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) helps the dough become more manageable and gives a helping hand to give your bread good volume." (They also say, "Flour is no longer bleached in the UK.")

baking911.com's Bread Baking 101 has a page on dough enhancers that says Ascorbic Acid

Creates an acidic environment for the yeast which helps it work better. It also acts as a preservative & deters mold and bacterial growth. With just a touch of ascorbic acid, your Artisan breads, the yeast will work longer and faster. French bakers add it to their French bread, baguette or boule recipe.
If you can't find pure ascorbic acid crystals you can use Fruit Fresh (canning isle) or a crushed/powdered vitamin C tablet, but measure accordingly. 1/8 tsp. per recipe

They've got plenty of info about other enhancers and about baguettes, but I'm skeptical about their baguette recipe, since it doesn't suggest a long fermentation with old dough. King Arthur� Flour has an interesting discussion about what they call preferments, which confused me. (They mean pre-ferments, not preferments.) But while they say p�te ferment�e is the same as "old dough", that's not exactly what the French call "chef"

Meanwhile, I just discovered that what is usually sold as bread flour in the supermarkets is not just high-gluten flour, but high-gluten flour with malted barley flour and...ascorbic acid. Ochef explains bread flour "is especially useful as a component in rye, barley and other mixed-grain breads, where the added lift of the bread flour is necessary to boost the other grains."


Update
Check this post out.