Making French Bread
Jan. 5th, 2021 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerA week ago I baked French bread. It was my first time, though after baking challah bread a few times it seemed like not a big stretch. Both are yeast breads and they have basically the same core ingredients. Many parts of the process are similar, too.
I began by mixing the dough. Flour, water, yeast, and small amounts of sugar and oil. This part of the process is the same as other breads I've made recently, so I skipped taking pictures. Next I kneaded the dough for a few minutes, by hand, and set it aside in a covered bowl to rise for two hours. This is virtually identical, too, so again no new pictures.
The spot where the bread-making process really begins to diverge is in forming the loaf. Recall with challah we divided the dough into pieces and rolled each into a strand by hand, then braided the strands to form the lovely distinctive shape. With French bread, though, the dough is rolled out flat to start with.
![Rolling out dough for french bread [Dec 2020]](https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/file/21156.jpg "Rolling out dough for french bread [Dec 2020]")
I've got to say, I was impressed by how easy it was to roll out this dough. Recently I've made pizza using ready-made raw dough bought from the store a handful of times. (Trader Joe's has sold this for years; now Safeway offers it, too, so it's easy to grab while shopping.) The challenge with those pre-made doughs is that they're often hard to roll out. Sometimes they cooperate, but most of the time it's a struggle to get them thin without tearing. This fresh dough, though, was very pliable. It reminded me that next time I want to make a pizza on fresh dough I need to go all the way on fresh and make it myself!
Anyway, back to French bread. One you roll the dough out thin and evenly you then roll up the flat sheet to form a loaf. This surprised me. Why not just form the dough ball into a loaf directly? I wondered. My cookbook says it's to press out air bubbles.
I didn't capture pictures of what the raw loaves look like but you can get a sense of their shape from this picture of the finished product.
![Fresh baked french bread [Dec 2020]](https://canyonwalker.dreamwidth.org/file/20831.jpg "Fresh baked french bread [Dec 2020]")
In the loaf at the top you can see some of the shape of rolling up a flat sheet of dough. "It looks like a huge croissant!" Hawk remarked. "Yum!" Alas, that croissant-like peak was an error. I was supposed to roll up the dough more tightly, and pinch it together better at the end, to prevent it from partially unraveling like that. But we did like that croissant-like peak so much we tore it off first for a taste test. 😂
So how did it taste?
Enh.
It wasn't bad... but it also wasn't good. It was bland. It tasted like what you might imagine baking flour and water together, with a bit of sugar, butter, and salt, would taste like. Had I forgotten a key ingredient? I wondered. No; I triple-checked the cookbook recipe. For my next try I'll explore other recipes to see what variations are out there. I might also check to see what other kind of yeast I can get my hands on, as yeast is the one thing in the short list of ingredients that seems like it could vary quite substantially from one variety to the next.
I began by mixing the dough. Flour, water, yeast, and small amounts of sugar and oil. This part of the process is the same as other breads I've made recently, so I skipped taking pictures. Next I kneaded the dough for a few minutes, by hand, and set it aside in a covered bowl to rise for two hours. This is virtually identical, too, so again no new pictures.
The spot where the bread-making process really begins to diverge is in forming the loaf. Recall with challah we divided the dough into pieces and rolled each into a strand by hand, then braided the strands to form the lovely distinctive shape. With French bread, though, the dough is rolled out flat to start with.
I've got to say, I was impressed by how easy it was to roll out this dough. Recently I've made pizza using ready-made raw dough bought from the store a handful of times. (Trader Joe's has sold this for years; now Safeway offers it, too, so it's easy to grab while shopping.) The challenge with those pre-made doughs is that they're often hard to roll out. Sometimes they cooperate, but most of the time it's a struggle to get them thin without tearing. This fresh dough, though, was very pliable. It reminded me that next time I want to make a pizza on fresh dough I need to go all the way on fresh and make it myself!
Anyway, back to French bread. One you roll the dough out thin and evenly you then roll up the flat sheet to form a loaf. This surprised me. Why not just form the dough ball into a loaf directly? I wondered. My cookbook says it's to press out air bubbles.
I didn't capture pictures of what the raw loaves look like but you can get a sense of their shape from this picture of the finished product.
In the loaf at the top you can see some of the shape of rolling up a flat sheet of dough. "It looks like a huge croissant!" Hawk remarked. "Yum!" Alas, that croissant-like peak was an error. I was supposed to roll up the dough more tightly, and pinch it together better at the end, to prevent it from partially unraveling like that. But we did like that croissant-like peak so much we tore it off first for a taste test. 😂
So how did it taste?
Enh.
It wasn't bad... but it also wasn't good. It was bland. It tasted like what you might imagine baking flour and water together, with a bit of sugar, butter, and salt, would taste like. Had I forgotten a key ingredient? I wondered. No; I triple-checked the cookbook recipe. For my next try I'll explore other recipes to see what variations are out there. I might also check to see what other kind of yeast I can get my hands on, as yeast is the one thing in the short list of ingredients that seems like it could vary quite substantially from one variety to the next.
