Cooking With Amy: French Bread Edition

For my third bread making adventure I was going to make rye bread but surprise surprise, I didn't have enough salt (or any molasses for that matter).  Since I was determined to make ANY type of bread, I flipped through the cookbook until I found a bread that used less than 1 TBSP of salt (because that was all I had).  So french bread it was!  You can read about bread 1&2 here and here.

If you want to try your hand at making bread, start with french bread...it is super simple.  It's only flour, water, salt and yeast.  That's it.  I halved the recipe to get one loaf four baguettes.

You mix.

You let it rise.

You make mini baguettes. (They have a different name which is escaping me at the moment.  I think it is the french word for bastard...no I'm not kidding.)

My first mini baguette was the best.  The others, along with my patience, deteriorated until they looked more like dog bones than bread.

You preheat the oven to 550 degrees (or as high as your oven will go) then bake at 450 degrees.

But first, you pour a cup of water into a pan beneath the bread to make steam which has something to do with the hard crust of the bread.  

While impatiently trying to admire your handiwork you open the oven and peek in to see how they are doing. You LEAN AWAY when you open the oven door (not lean into) so as not to burn your corneas retinas eyeballs. (This was learned the hard way.)

You wonder if the hardness of the crust is normal (it is and will soften over time) and dig in while it is still too hot to touch because it looks delicious.

File under: it smells even better than it looks.  Oh la la.