Daring Bakers February Challenge – French Bread
There’s been a lot of bread baking going on in my kitchen lately, I mean serious bread baking, not the making of the usual everyday bread and if it continues like this there wont be any more of that bread at all. Oh no, I can feel that I have entered a new stage of my baking life, or maybe I should say that I’m regressing to the time when I actually had a lot of fun baking and tried out different types of bread! This month the Daring Bakers challenge was bread, Julia Child’s French bread to be exact. I did expect that it would be bread considering that it is Mary aka Breadchick of The Sour Dough and Sara of i like to cook who are hosting this month (and for your information they are also Bread Baking Babes as well) and now that I have baked and am beginning to learn how to make French bread I can also say that I’m very happy about their choice: Julia Child’s French bread! You can find the recipe here and here and I really suggest you to try it. There are even videos where you can check out how to make and shape it in case you need some moral support.
I baked the bread together with Tanna this time and we even had web cams on for awhile, Karen was out somewhere discoing I think, but we felt old and responsible so we baked bread instead. (Not that I regret that but maybe I would have gone discoing too if someone had asked me. Noone ever does anymore though). This was the first time ever in my career as a Daring Baker I actually made the challenge twice, it’s such a great bread and I feel that I want to learn how bake it perfectly so there will be many more times. There was one problem though, it takes quite a while to make it, it has to rise for quite a while and as our house is on coldish side, it took even longer which meant that there was very little light when I finally could photograph the bread so the photos are not that great. But who cares when the bread is! Great I mean. The whole family loves it, unfortunately the recipe only gives you 3 batards (i.e. short baguettes) and with five in the family, that’s far too little! But I can alway double the recipe can’t I? So I have to say Thank You to Mary and Sara for both providing such a great challenge AND for being such patient and great hosts, I knew you were nice but now I know even better!
To see what the other DBers French Bread check out the DB Blogroll here!
