Yesterday I made two French Baguettes from a recipe in a Le Cordon
Bleu cookbook I have.

I have no idea how authentic it is, though my son has been making the
same recipe for several weeks and reckons it's pretty much how they
tasted in the month he spent in France. However, he tells me my
baguettes are too fat.

They were about 12 inches long, but it was hard to stretch the very
elastic dough to shape them. When I read the recipe I thought it
wouldn't work. It is just flour, yeast, water and salt, a very dry
mixture. But it worked and it tasted great. I compared it with recipes
on the Internet and that's all French baguettes seem to be -- no fat
of any kind.

Here's a pic of my finished bread. We had it with mussels, moules
mariniere.

http://i1.tinypic.com/mhaols.jpg