A Spoonful of Sugar

Riddle me this... what recipe sprawls over ten pages and takes seven hours to complete?

Julia Child's French Bread, of course!

Julia Child evokes warm, fuzzy feelings in the hearts of many Americans, however on this side of the pond she's hardly a household name. So I headed over to Wikipedia--I know, I know... hardly an accurate source, but it's a good starting point--for some background, and was amazed to discover that she worked in US Intelligence during WWII. Very cool.

It was also quite inspiring to read that she only started cooking seriously in her 40s. That should give hope to career changers or even the most inexperienced and nervous cooks, presuming they want to improve, of course!

Julia's French Bread clocks in at an impressive ten pages as already mentioned. It's not just a recipe, though. It's more of a treatise on the art of French bread-making as it stood in the fifties.

The best bread is often the simplest, and you can't get much more simple than Julia's ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water. One of the requirements for this month's challenge was that we use all-purpose flour to get as close as possible to the 8% gluten that French bakers use. I've got to admit, this hurt. I hate using all-purpose/plain flour for bread baking. It always produces a weak, flabby dough and in any case, the brand that I use is 11% protein and my standard bread flour (Dove's) is 12.8%. I really, really wanted to pull out the bread flour but decided that I should be a proper Daring Baker and put aside my prejudices.

Despite--or perhaps because of--the length of the recipe, it went pretty well. Certainly much better than last month's disastrous Lemon Meringue Pie.

My crust wasn't terrifically hard--no nice shattering noises when I tore into the loaf, alas--but it was very tasty indeed. I did manage to get some decent-sized holes in the crumb which worked perfectly for holding butter. The flavour was good, but as I've never had real French bread I don't have anything to compare it to. I can say, however, that it was a decent loaf of bread. I've baked far better in the past and I'm sure I will in the future, but I'm glad that I gave this recipe a whirl!

The best thing about this recipe was that it gave me the perfect opportunity to christen my shiny new dough scraper and lame, bought in a (slightly) enthusiastic splurge after my cookery course last weekend. I've always wanted a lame and I have to say that the proper tool makes a massive difference. Normally even my sharpest knife drags and deflates the dough, but the lame glided through without snagging. And the dough scraper was awesome! Very good for mixing and also the initial very sticky stage of the kneading. I've actually been using it every day when chopping vegetables as it's a nice safe way of transferring them from board to pot or container. Better for your knife, too, I suspect.

Next time round I think I will swap to bread flour and perhaps reduce the amount of yeast as my dough rose twice as fast as the recipe dictated, despite my efforts to find the coldest spot in the house. I think that proving the dough on the final baking sheet would also be an improvement--I lost a lot of air in the painstaking transfer between cloth, intermediate and baking sheet. As the crust wasn't terribly golden or very hard--but still tasty!--I would increase the oven temperature to maximum for the first 10 minutes of baking, and then drop it back down.

For the full recipe (and helpful pictures), visit Breadchick Mary's website.