French Bread

Bread is tricky. I've baked a lot of cakes and pies and cookies and never spent much time on bread until now. Baking decent bread isn't too difficult, but I can see that making great bread involves a lot of trial and error. Humid conditions and an old oven are probably not helping much but I'm going with the theory that anything is possible with enough effort. How very German of me... I know.

So far, my French bread attempt has been my favorite. That's not to say it's a perfect loaf of bread. Far from it. But... this has been the first loaf of bread that really had that lovely aroma of freshly baked, home made bread. There was nothing that was going to stop me from tearing off an end of the loaf as soon as it came out of the oven so that I could have a taste. It tastes as good as it smells.

On to the challenges:

• Crust:  The crust was crusty last night when it was baked. This morning... not so much. Too much humidity? Not sure. Proper french bread should get crustier, stale even, after sitting around for a while. I tried a different method for steaming. I sprayed the bread a few times in the first 10 minutes of baking. This turned out to be a bad idea. The loaf closest to the spray ended up bursting on the side with the most moisture. Will need to try another technique next time.
• Center: It's delicious and there are bubbles, but I suspect some of the dough is still too dense. The culprit is likely that I'm underproofing.

More proofing time and different steaming technique will be tried out later when I try a whole wheat french bread. Wish me luck!