Daring Bakers - French Bread

Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah

(From Foux Da Fa Fa by Flight of the Conchords)

This month is only my second Daring Bakers Challenge, but I believe that I have now earned the title "Daring Baker". Our hosts this month are Mary of The Sour Dough and Sara of I Like to Cook.


From the moment that I learned that this month's challenge was bread, I knew that I would be testing my abilities, as I am not generally a bread baker. And when I printed off the 15 pages of instructions and tried to digest them, I knew that I was in for a challenge!


When I read all the fabulous French names for the various shapes of this bread, I was immediately reminded of a novelty song called Foux Da Fa Fa by Flight of the Conchords, a Kiwi musical comedy duo, in which the word "baguette" is bandied around numerous times to comic effect. And, well, my efforts at making this bread were sometimes pretty comical, in between all the flour coating my kitchen, trying to wrap my head around the instructions, and trying to coax my bread to rise after shaping.


At stage 1 of the process, my dough looked pretty good:

This is the dough after being placed in the bowl for the first rising. You can see a mark on the right hand side of the bowl where it was expected to rise to:

At this stage, the dough didn't disappoint me - it rose almost out of the bowl, and the yeast looked as if it had been very active:

After deflation and another rising, it was time to shape the bread. I had to say that this step was good fun, especially making the round "cushion" shapes with the lovely soft dough. To see that smooth, round shape emerge from the irregular shaped pieces of dough was magic! To test my daring, I chose to make a batard, a boule and four petit pains. I found the batard harder than the round loaves, but it seemed to go OK.

However, this is where my problems began, because two hours after shaping, the dough had still not risen at all. As it was late in the evening, I used the oven trick mentioned by Sara and Mary to coax the bread to rise. Unfortunately, I knocked the batard shape around a bit by shoving it in the oven in a hurry, so the diameter along its length was no longer as even as it had been. After another half an hour, the petit pains had risen a treat, the boule had risen somewhat and the batard had risen a little. (I imagine that I would not have had this issue with varying rising times if I had made all of the dough into the same size and shape.) This is the point where I said "sod it" because it was getting quite late, and baked the lot. I did not find it necessary to use fleurage to prevent sticking of the shaped dough during the process of transferring it to the oven tray for baking - although I did process some pasta in readiness!

With the aim of producing "handsome" loaves as described in the instructions, I put a pan of ice cubes in the bottom of my oven to create steam, and painted the surface of the bread with water during the early stages of baking. Here is the bread after three minutes of baking, when I removed it from the oven to "paint" the crust with water:

The bread looks pretty handsome to me! The finished product is pictured at the top of the post, and this is what the bread looked like inside after having been left overnight to cool:

The bread looked fine inside and out (although you can see that the batard suffered somewhat from my impatience in not allowing it enough time to rise). Its texture is of the chewy variety (it contains no fat), just like restaurant dinner rolls. Unfortunately, this type of bread has never been a favourite of mine. I am not a big eater of bread, and when I do partake, my preference is for soft Scotch baps and the like. The bread tasted perfectly fine - it was just not my thing.

I ate one of the petit pains for breakfast - cold with jam on one half, and warm with promite on the other half. I much preferred it warm. However, I gave the remainder of the bread to my friend, Veronica. She likes bread, and proceeded to eat a petit pain with nothing on it while I was visiting her. This helped to confirm that my bread was not a dud - it is just that I am not a fan of this type of bread.

That said, I learned a lot from this challenge. In particular, I learned how crucial temperature is to bread rising; how to trick bread to rise when it steadfastly refuses to do so unaided; and how to achieve those gorgeous loaf shapes that you see in better quality bakeries. It also made me face my fear of bread-making head on. This is what the Daring Bakers is all about. Thanks to Mary and Sara for proposing a daring challenge indeed.

If you are simply curious about how to make French bread or would like to have a go yourself, the instructions can be downloaded from Mary's site.

You can check out the exploits of all the other Daring Bakers here.