Julia Child's French Bread

This blog seems to be steadily becoming more focused on bread than on anything else, but I'm not going to stray from the trend with this post; I have another bread recipe to show you . Today I decided to try my hand at Julia Child's French bread recipe from her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume 2.

I took a quick look online for the recipe, as I really didn't want to type it up here. You can find the instructions at: http://andreasrecipes.com/2008/02/29/the-daring-bakers-make-julia-childs-french-bread/. 

The cookbook has many bread recipes to try, including brioche, regular white sandwich bread, and croissants, but the most basic of them is the French bread. Like Laura Calder's boule recipe that I posted about last month, French bread consists of only water, yeast, flour, and salt; it's really the most basic a bread recipe can get.

Where the recipe gets a little bit more complicated is that it requires kneading (which I have little experience doing), the numerous risings (three in fact), shaping the loaves, and creating a golden crust, but the instructions are extremely helpful so that I had little difficulty executing the recipe. I particularly appreciated the fact that Julia Child took the time to explain why kneading has to be done, because I'm not a very experienced bread baker and it opened my eyes up to developing the gluten of the bread so that it'll hold its shape in the oven.

I've mentioned that the other steps are complicated too, but I suppose they're really just time consuming for the most part. During the three risings, you just have to wait; I started making the bread around 1:00 today and had it baked and out of the oven by 10:00. Shaping the loaves was easy enough too (I chose to shape the dough in to two batards and one boule), but I know that I could have done a little bit better with browning the bread more evenly and creating better defined slashes in the bread. One of Julia Child's techniques for browning bread crust is by brushing water on the loaves a couple times every three minutes at the beginning of the baking process. Similarly, I added pans of water to the oven to create steam that would help create that lovely, crispy, golden crust. I think I could have stood to paint the water on the bread more evenly, but that's just for the sake of appearance any way. For the slashes, I didn't cut deep enough so they weren't that noticeable. Again, I guess I'm just being picky, but they're good things to know for next time. 

Overall, I was really pleased with the results. The crust was golden and crispy, and the bread didn't have the density bread has when it hasn't been given enough time to rise. The crumb of the bread was nice, with little holes on the inside, and the flavour of the bread was delicious. We tried a couple pieces of the bread with wedges of brie which was the perfect accompaniment.