French-Style Bread

It's our second installment, and we've already blown the proposed agenda. Next recipe in the book was Basic Homestyle Bread, but we were having people over and I wanted good bread for spreading cheese on and that didn't seem to fit the bill so we skipped ahead. Spoiler alert: it was good.

Beard is careful to say that this isn't, technically speaking, French bread, and he surprised me by saying, basically, if you want a good French bread recipe go read Julia Child. Which, fine by me, I don't know the difference.

A few odd quirks of this recipe. One is, he has us mix the flour a bit at a time into the water and yeast, rather than mixing the water into the flour. Dunno if that made any difference to the product; didn't seem any easier or harder to me. Recipe called for "5 to 6 cups flour," which I thought was needlessly vague (and yes, I understand that different people on different days in different climates blah blah blah, but come on). The correct answer, for those playing at home, is 6. No second rise in this recipe; instead, you shape the loaves, put them on a pan covered in cornmeal, put the pan in a cold oven, and turn it on. Labor saving, perhaps? Seemed to work okay, though I think the final flavor may have suffered a little. Also, I'll have to work on this cornmeal method; this time the cornmeal not under the bread started to burn a little. Oh, and I felt this recipe was under-salted, which surprised me after Basic White Bread, which was so generous with the salt.

All that said, though, this was tasty bread. Certainly very pretty. Excellent inside texture, and respectable crust. I underbaked it just a tad, so that'd help the crust next time. Overall the quirks in the method made it a particularly easy recipe. It wouldn't be great for bread or toast, but it was excellent for having at the table and passing around tearing chunks off of for cheese and olive oil and hummus. Thumbs up.

Oh, and it was a terrific meal overall. The bread went with fancy cheese (d'Afinoise and Bucheret), fresh veggies and toasted pita with Ruth's home-made hummus, fresh corn and stone-fruit salad, and skirt steak that was just amazing. Also, Smitten Kitchen's Vermontucky Lemonade and fine beers, and we finished with Amelia's amazing chocolate cake with lemon-whiskey buttercream.

On a less successful note, I went to Berkeley Bowl today to get some of the flours we'll be needing for this project, and they had never heard of "hard wheat flour." Which is a problem, because Beard swears by it and some of the recipes require it. Laurel says it's basically high-protein flour, for which we can substitute bread flour. Which I guess we'll try? Other thoughts?