Daring Bakers: French Bread

"Sacre bleu, we have to make French Bread!" I declared on seeing February's Daring Baker challenge.
"Sacre bleu!" echoed Mr A&N.
(Now if I'm honest, we didn't so much utter 'sacre bleu' as have another form of French escape our lips, but this is a family-friendly blog and I've given up bad language for Lent.)

The French bread recipe wasn't for the feint of heart or fleet of food - or those with a short attention span. At 15 pages, this was a recipe to either break you or make you respect Julia Child for her commitment to helping you create France's food classics. With 3 risings taking at least an hour each, and kneadings and shapings in between, this was also a commitment to spending the best part of your day elbow-deep in yeast.

And so the work began. I always struggle when kneading dough, fighting against adding more flour to keep the dough from sticking to my hands or the work top. I fought that instinct and respected Julia, and despite some profound stickiness saw through the tactile stages just with the amounts proscribed.


My dough rose beautifully. It had achieved its first rise in about 2 hours but due to one thing and another I didn't get to take it out and knead it again until almost the 3 hour mark. It rose beautifully again in the second rise, and again I had to leave it for the outer-edge of the suggested rise-time since I was busy with other things.The shaping stage was now upon me, and though I had to read the directions several times through and practice my hand formations before bringing out the dough, this also proved fairly easy and I emerged with 6 loaves of batons, waiting for their final rise before they could become real French bread.


And this was when my flawless Daring Bakers experience caved in on me. Or, more punningly, failed to rise to the occasion. On the third rise, nothing happened. The first hour passed, and they hadn't budged from their thin cigar shapes. Thinking that perhaps the kitchen temperature had gone down from earlier in the day (it was 8pm by this stage), I popped the dough in a barely-heated oven to encourage any yeast that was getting the shivers. I can't tell if it was my imagination or that the dough did make a feeble stab at rising, but come 9pm and still not being in possession of puffy baguettes, I baked them anyway.

The bread was beautiful in flavor, well crusted and had been the best dough I've yet worked with, so emerging from 9 hours of heavy flour and wrist action with only 6 flat breads to show for it was disappointing. The charcouterie and pate I bought in anticipation of stuffing them into my own French bread had to instead by eaten either on these bread-crackers or just eaten plain (gosh life's difficult). I asked other DB'ers for advice about what may have gone wrong, and the popular suggestion was that my poor yeast simply ran out of food.


On the bright side, I defrosted the potato bread dough I had rushed into the freezer during our November challenge. It seemed to somehow be more glutinous and yeasty than what I remember the fresh dough to be, and it baked into an absolutely fantastic loaf. Hooray for Daring Bakers bread making.

Please do visit our valiant hosts for the month - Mary/BreadChick from The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.