The benefit of homemade French bread

I married into the French culture over twelve years ago. The French population’s relationship to bread has no parallel. Bread is served at every meal with copious amounts of butter. Finding equivalent quality bread in North America is next to impossible.

Full disclosure: It took me 12 years to make bread that met my husband’s high standards.

I will not be touching on the subject of Wonder Bread or other bagged breads. These, in my opinion, are NOT bread.

My desire to make bread arose when I learned of a bread oven in a crumbling stone farm building at my in-laws. The oven had been used daily in the prior centuries by 4 out of 7 generations of the family to have lived there. The secret recipe to this farmhouse bread was lost sometime in the 1940s. I wanted our children to grow up with a part of their heritage reclaimed.

My attempts at bread making initially were that of recipes of North American, Italian, or German origin featuring various types of flour, sugar, milk, olive oil, and all a manner of additives. The bread would come out yeasty or like sourdough. The crumb would be the wrong texture. The bread would dry up too quickly or be too wet. Sometimes, the bread would taste fantastic. However, for each of these loaves my husband would shake his head and say,

“Its okay. I can see that you did a lot of work here, but let’s buy our bread.”

The bread maker started to collect dust.

Then, the Canadian bread scandal unfolded. Suddenly, that loaf of bread we were eating which cost between $2.50 and $6.00 depending on its source, started to look suspect. We tried to find the perfect loaf that would consistently meet our desire for crust, crumbs, and freshness. The price tag inched upwards as we looked for quality, non-plastic bagged bread. Week after week we’d try a different bread, but unfortunately, nothing would do.

The bread would be moldy within days or would not be consumed as no one liked the texture or taste. We were throwing money in the trash for the amount of bread composted.

The best bang for your buck is the Costco baguette. But even this is white sandwich bread that has been rolled out as a baguette. Ace Bakery also makes a great baguette, but the cost is too high to be anything more than an occasional bread.

The days we find a warm baguette and rush home, it’s gone within one meal. Exceptional baguettes shouldn’t keep more than a day; going rock hard is in their nature.

The secret to baking French Bread

If you love bread, and by reading this article, you probably do, I recommend watching Julia Child in action making French bread. She doesn’t make it look particularly easy, but she does break it down into the simplest ingredients. Flour. Water. Yeast. Salt.

Please note that there is no milk, no sugar, and no additional starches or powders required for making your basic baguette. She has another recipe for sandwich bread, a.k.a. pain de mie which adds milk and butter. French Brioche adds eggs and even more butter to make a rich bread.

Combining the instructions given in both recipes, I found that adding extra water (1.5 cups instead of 1.25 cups) gives me just the right give to the dough to sufficiently knead using my mixer dough hook. She also gives the best lesson on how to know when the dough is ready.

Bringing her lesson to the modern era, all I need is

• the mixer bowl, dough paddle, heavy countertop mixer
• something to make the bowl airtight, like a clean compost bag and a large enough rubber band to seal the rim
• an overnight rise (read this as Artisan, the loaf you spend extra $$ on)

No floury mess. One bowl to clean up. I bake the bread either as a loaf in a bread pan or as two baguettes (batards) on a baguette baking sheet; no greasing is required, as I’ve never had an issue with the finished bread. I use Julia’s method for folding the baguettes into shape and adding steam during baking.

It took a few runs, but husband’s final verdict,

Can you make this more often?

VICTORY IS MINE.

Frequency and Cost

I have made a loaf twice or thrice weekly for the last three months with no complaints. We buy a 10 Kg bag of unbleached flour (bleached is fine, too) for about $12–18. Approximately 500g of flour per loaf gives me 20 loaves for less than or about a dollar each.

In terms of time to make bread, once you get into a routine, it’s child’s play to neglect a bowl of rising dough in the fridge or on the counter. Baking bread is all about neglect. There’s something therapeutic in purposefully neglecting something in life. Less than 25 minutes of total work is involved to prepare your daily bread; the rest of the work is up to the yeast.

• 15–20 minutes for initial dough formation using a mixer
• 30 seconds to fold the dough, 3–12** hours after the first rise
• 2 minutes to form the loaf/baguettes, 3–12** hours after the second rise
• 30 seconds to turn on the oven and potentially score the bread
• 35–45 min Baking time

** You Can always leave it in the fridge overnight. I don’t recommend leaving it out on the counter for 12 hours overnight BUT the one time that happened in the winter, the bread was DELICIOUS. I suspect a summer accident would leave you with dough that would be great for pizza at the worst, but there are plenty of things you can do with over-proofed dough.

My Recipe

My final recipe for bread morphed from Julia Child’s original

• 3.5 cups flour
• 2 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 1/4 tsp yeast
• 1.5 cups water

Optional: 1/2 a stick of room temperature butter added to the dough after it formed and before the first rise. This gives it a Je ne sais quoi type of finish. I stumbled on this when I accidentally mixed recipes to make sandwich bread using water instead of milk (See Julia Child’s recipe for Pain de Mie).

Bake 35–45 minutes at 400–425 deg F (depends on the day, but the result seems to be the same no matter the variance here)

Something learned is something gained: Canadian flour is higher in protein, about 12–14%, while the AP Flour in the U.S. is only 9–12%, and it makes a great difference. Higher protein flour is favored for baking bread. Bread flour in the UK is called Canadian Flour.