French Bread!

Ok, I finally got around to making my first loafs of French Bread. It really wasn't to hard.

I was able to make this stuff on the left into actual bread! I thought I was going need butter and egg to coat the top, but the recipe I ended up using was very simple and didn't call for it.

For a long time bread has fascinated me. When I was young my Mum used to take me to a bakery in Mendocino CA. to get a slice of pizza once a month. Walking in to the bakery always smelled great. There were so many delicious things there, but the pizza was what I was most excited about. I still get that warm feeling every time I walk into a bakery. Nothing smells as good as fresh baked bread.

Later in life I realized that a good portion of the population probably didn't have the skills to make bread without buying the ingredients from a grocery store. So I set forth trying to learn the science of bread making.

The thing I find most interesting is the concept of Yeast.

Single Cell organisms that produce gases and makes the flour rise. How someone figured this out over 10,000 years ago is beyond me. But there it is bubbling when warm water is added.


Mixing the flour with the Yeast starter was harder than I thought it was going to be. I think I need to invest in a good mixer.

kneading the bread dough wasn't to hard, but it was messy.
Once again its amazing how the bread dough rises.

It gave Marni and I a chance to catch a movie, but because of that it ended up rising an extra hour.
In the end it looked and tasted just like French bread! Personally it turned out a little heavier than I was expecting. Actually if I stuck it in a bread pan it would have made good sliced bread for sandwiches. I'll have to try making that sometime.

But for now I have solved some of the mysteries bread held for me. Like how do you make flour and Yeast from scratch? Also it turns out people prefer to use sea salt.

So now if things get so bad in the world that we have bread lines in America, I'm confident that we could figure out a way to make our own delicious bread! All done without having to buy things from a grocery store.

You can get sea salt from the Ocean. A 10x10 sqr ft patch of wheat can give you enough flour to make 25-30 loafs of bread. And Yeast can be found on the skin of Organic grapes, or even by boiling potato water and leaving it out for a while so natural Yeast in the air will start to grow in it.

I still have to do some research on that.

After I make my next batch of bread, I plan to learn how to make Pizza Crust! Maybe some corn bread as well as tortes for tacos! To me baking seems like a blast, but oddly I have no desire to learn how to cook.