Perfecting The French Art Of Bread

Thanks to a good friend of mine who has a copy of the book Bread Alone by Daniel Leader and a very insightful boy who saw me drooling on said copy of the book and ordered me a copy (as well as one for himself).  I have been baking my own bread for several years now, basically since I started this blog.  I had relied for a long time on Whole Grain Breads by Hand or Machine by Beatrice Ojakangas, which provides for a wonderful introduction to baking bread.  In my quest for food perfection, however, I had outgrown this book, and was itching to take my bread to the next level.  Instead of recycling my original bread book, I gave it to boy, who did not realize that Bread Alone is for "fancy" bread and well, decided that he would like to flex his bread muscles first on some more basic recipes.

Bread Alone is a wonderful read.  I have been slowly working my way through his stories and vast wealth of information about flour, kneading, and temperature.  Its a bit overwhelming if you don't already have confidence with dough.  However, I have been just waiting for the right time to try the baguette recipe in Breaad Alone.  It wasn't until I was working from home and an old episode of Julia Child's cooking show came onto PBS which just happened to be an episode where she brings in a guest baker to demonstrate how to make a baguette.  Since then, I have been craving, no, let me reword that, NEEDING to make a real French Baguette.  This produced the most airy beautifully crusty, perfectly developed gluten all stretchy and amazing baguette I have ever eaten.  Nothing but flour, water, yeast, and salt, and the techniques in this book produce the most flavorful bread I have ever baked in my home (without the help of things like maple syrup, etc.).

I'm not going to blog the recipe's measurements here for copyright reasons since I basically followed this recipe to the T (pubicly available recipes and/or recipes I have changed so much that it resembles the original recipes are fair game).  Besides, most people ready for this recipe probably already own 20 bread books which they can use.  And, depending on the kind of flour used, the humidity, and the temperature, all of the measurements will be off anyway.  I used a combination of whole wheat flour, all purpose flour, and unbleached bread flour... a slight variation on the flours called for in the recipe.

This is not a recipe for the faint.  You need to plan ahead and allot at least 5 hours for the actual bread baking day.  It seems overly complicated, much like making english muffins.  But much like my infamous english muffins, this is completely worth it.  It starts with a poolish, which is basically water, flour, and a tiny amount of yeast which makes a thick batter and then is left to ferment for some amount of time.  I dunno, its a silly name, I've always known it as a sourdough starter, but apparantly when you graduate to baking real bread, you have to call it a poolish.  This one required a 24-hour fermentation at room temperature. This was my first real lesson of utmost importance because most recipes I've seen only say let it sit for about 4-6 hours or just overnight.  I noticed that the flavor of the bread is vastly improved by a longer fermentation at this step.

The day I baked, I mixed the poolish with more water, yeast, and salt, and then gradually mixed in more flour.  It was this stage where kneading became incredibly important and where I learned my second lesson.  With french bread, you need to really develop the gluten, while avoiding the classic blunder of incorporating too much flour.  I had no idea I needed to aggressively knead this dough for almost 20 minutes (seriously, you have to start attacking towards the end because the gluten flights back), and I learned how a dough scraper is very important so you don't have to keep adding flour all the time to keep the dough from sticking to the surface. 

Lesson number three involved understanding how temperature affects dough.  This fermentation once the dough is done is much longer than the 1 hour most recipes call for.  In fact, the dough should go for about 2.5 hours at 78 degrees.  This Now, I have to keep my house at 68-70 degrees for the beer I brew.  So I don't have many options for a warmer part of my house... except my bathroom which has radiant heated tile floors.  So I set my tile floors to about 80 degrees and put the bowl in the bathroom.  I know, wierd, but hey, it works. 

I then learned how to keep a baguette shaped roughly like a baguette (actually, I think baguettes are too skinny, so I opted for something just a big fatter than a baguette), this meaning a loaf of bread that was actually round rather than the ubiquitous long oval shape when sliced.  First, it is important to let the dough rest about 30 minutes after you divide it and shape into balls to let the gluten relax.  Then it is important to take a linen or non-fuzzy cotton dish towel and liberally flour it.  This means rubbing flour over every surface to fill in all the little air holes.  Then, after you have shaped your dough into 12-14" torpedos, put it onto the dish towel, pull up the seam so it creates a little wall, and then put the next piece on the other side, and repeat.  The final rising is 1.5 hours. 

My final lesson was learning that I could use a very good serrated knife that has been floured to score my loaves.  Scoring loaves properly has been a mystery to me, mostly because I kept forgetting to buy razors.

These loaves were baked on a pizza stone preheated for 1 hour at 450 degrees with water sprayed into the oven just before they went in and about 3 minutes after they went in.