Making French Bread

A 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.



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.

On the Verge of the Next Surge?

Back in November I touted that California was among the states least hard-hit by the Coronavirus. For example, in a Nov 16 blog I noted that California was the 6th safest state in the US. The metric I focused on in that journal and others is the population-adjusted 7-day average of new cases. I've chosen it because it basically it answers the question, "What percentage of people in this area got sick recently?" or "What's the chance that a person you might meet in this state is sick right now?" For quite a while California scored quite a bit below the national average.

In early December that comparison began to shift. Rates in California began climbing, not just relative to its previous rates but also relative to other states (many of which were also getting worse). California adopted a new, stricter lockdown policy in response. In a Dec 18 journal I noted we'd climbed to the 3rd worst state in the US. What was causing the spike?



In hindsight it's obvious what caused the spike. Thanksgiving. Rates of new cases ticked up sharply starting 5 days after Thanksgiving (5 days being a typical incubation time after infection) and continued for a few weeks as more and more people fell sick and sought medical care.

The story told by the data aligns with the stories told by my friends and colleagues. After 8 months of following health guidelines and rules better than most other parts of the country, Californians were basically burned out. Most people I knew in California traveled for Thanksgiving and visited people from other households. Oh, everyone had their reasons. Everyone had their explanation for why what they were doing was safe, even though all of it was contrary to exhortations from public health experts.

California was hardly unique in this regard. Rates all across the US accelerated starting 5 days after Thanksgiving.



It's just that daily new case rates tripled in California while only rising 30% nationwide. California is now the #2 state for highest per-capita recent new cases. Update: An NBC News article (5 Jan 2021) reports California is in 3rd (worst) place by a hair. It and the two states ahead of it are worse off than any country in the world right now. (The worst-off country is Czech Republic.)

Where does all this put us now? Well, it's January 5, just a few days after the Christmas and New Year holidays when a 9-month record number of people traveled. We might be looking at the next upward surge in the sickness rate launching this week.