melting your mouth

This month, I joined my first blogging event — The Daring Bakers. This is a group of (mostly) bloggers that all bake the same recipe once a month, and then all post on it the same day. One person sets this “challenge recipe” and everyone has to basically follow the recipe — few modifications are allowed. The idea is to bake outside our comfort zones a bit, but with a supportive group around to learn from and to compare our results. So this month I joined the Daring Bakers and our first recipe was Julia Child’s French Bread, hosted by Breadchick at The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.

Talk about a challenge! I was excited when I found out this month’s challenge would be bread since I haven’t ever made anything but quick bread before and I’d been wanting to try it. But, it was also intimidating. This bread required three different rises, and the shaping was also fairly complicated. (You would think you just roll it into a log to make a baguette, but there’s actually a lot more to it in order to make the bread so that it’ll form a nice crust and gain enough volume and be able to support itself without baking in a pan. Or so I read.) Also, in order to make a simulated “baker’s oven”, I had to find a way to produce steam in the oven. So, all told, a good 6-8 hours to complete, but it was a lot of fun. I was pretty pleased with how the bread looked and tasted. So, if you are feeling ambitious, I recommend this bread, but I will admit I probably won’t make a habit of making this every weekend.

Thanks again to Sara and Breadchick for coming up with a great the challenge this month, and check out my fellow Daring Bakers’ posts from the Daring Bakers Blogroll.

I’m not going to post all the details of the recipe — it’s several pages long — but here’s a very abridged version to give you an idea of what I had to do! If you do decide to tackle this, the full recipe is here (thanks, Breadchick!), or you can track down a copy of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

French Bread

1 package dry yeast
1/3 c warm water
3 1/2 c all purpose flour
2 1/4 t salt
1 1/4 c tepid water

(Yep, that’s it — only yeast, flour, salt and water!)

Le fraisage (the dough mixture)
Proof the yeast in 1/3 c warm water. Measure out the flour and salt, and add the yeast along with the rest of the water. Mix together. Turn the dough out onto kneading surface and let rest 2-3 minutes.

Le petrisage (kneading)
Knead 5-10 minutes, until it draws back when pushed. Let dough rest for 1-2 minutes. Knead again for a couple minutes.

Pointage premier temps (first rising)
Let rise in a warm place, until the dough is 3 1/2 times its original size.

Rupture, pointage deuxieme (deflating and second rising)
Deflate the dough by flipping one corner over the other a few times (more details in the real recipe). Let rise again, this time to not quite triple.

Cutting and resting the dough
Divide the dough into the appropriate size pieces for the type of bread to be made (baguettes, boules, etc. I made 2 ficelles and 2 petits pains). Cover and let rest 5 minutes before forming.

La tourne; la mise en place des patons (forming the loaves)
This was the most challenging part of this to me. Julia had a lot of instructions, but they weren’t entirely clear to me. I think I needed a video or something. It seemed to turn out ok though. As I said, I think the reason this is important is so you get this so called “cloak” of gluten that holds the bread together since it isn’t baked in a pan.

L’appret (final rise)
Let formed loaves rise until they are nearly triple in size. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 450, with some kind of ceramic, tile, etc. surface to bake the loaves on in the oven (I used a pizza stone).

Le demoulage (unmolding)
Transfer the risen loaves onto a baking sheet so you can slide them into the oven. I think this was the second trickiest part — getting the loaves into the oven without squishing the nice risen dough.

La coupe (slashing)
The dough is now slashed in several places so that you get that welling up of dough from underneath that’s classic on the top of a baguette or other French bread. (Third hardest part!)

Baking
Bake at 450 F for about 25 minutes, brushing the dough with water every 3 minutes at the beginning 3 times. Also, to simulate a baker’s oven, I added ice to the bottom of my oven to produce lots of steam. Fun!

Cooling
The bread should be cooled 2-3 hours before baking. I know — that’s pretty difficult too, but Julia says the bread will have a better taste once it’s “composed itself.”

Storage
The bread is ok for a couple days, but much better the first day. It can also be frozen, and thawed/reheated by placing in a cold oven and turning oven on to 400. In about 20 minutes, the bread tastes (almost) like it was fresh baked again. I’ve still got one loaf left in my freezer!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Bread, Daring Bakers, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.