French Bread Delights Me So Much I Ate The Whole Loaf!

You will note that in the pictures there are three loaves of bread but in actuality there are only two because I ate one. I ate one with butter and I ate the other half with cheese. It was heaven. They were still warm and they were perfectly soft and the crust was not too crusty. Oh. Heaven is a loaf of French bread.

Remember how I told you yesterday about the sponge dough? Well, the sponge is what we made our bread with today and really, that's all we did. Our class first measured out all the ingredients with which to make two batches of bread with. We used a 60 quart mixer (for those in Canada, 1 quart is 4 cups...that means a 60 quart mixer holds 240 cups -- it is an enormous mixer) to mix all the dough and since there was a serious amount of laziness in our class today, I was able to help out a lot. I poured in the water/yeast into the mixer, poured flour, scraped beaters and dough hooks of the excess, worked the mixer controls, helped the lovely Shannon scoop the dough into the bins for it to proof, did dishes and also did a lot of cleaning. It was a pretty fun day and there was a lot of laughing. The dough is very, very sticky and so it is often a little bit difficult to try and work with it but that also makes it a little fun. There is also so much dough that at one point I told someone that working with it was like trying to put a dress on a donkey. The dough had to rise for quite a while and be tended to by folding it like one would fold a letter every half an hour or so -- this was not easy, remember that I said it was a super sticky dough and that there was a lot of it? It was like trying to fold dough that was sticky and the size of a sandbox... After all the rising and folding, we shaped the dough into another rounded envelope with pinched ends and then we rolled it evenly till it looked like French bread and let it proof (or rise in the humidity box) again. We baked the bread till it had a nice golden brown and was hollow sounding and then I took it home and ate it.

We also worked with our "babies" or our sourdough starters by adding more flour and water to them and we did more math. Today the math was easier and I am sure that I will remember the formulas eventually but until then I need to look at my book a lot still... Tomorrow we are going to be using the other half of the bread that we made today to make more baguettes and we are also going to be making another couple of breads, I'm just not sure which ones just now because our chef is changing things around...until tomorrow, go buy some fresh bread and delight in the sensation of eating fresh, artisan bread that is still warm from the oven.



Our bread in the oven


Fresh bread right from the oven


All my pretty loaves