Parlez voux french bread?

As I mentioned in my last post, this past Sunday I devoted my day to staying home and baking an Authentic loaf of french bread Ala Julia Child. Following Julia's advice I read the recipe from start to finish, as well as all of her instructions and guidelines totally 17 pages of bread making.

Andrew got me out of bed at 7:30 so I had a decently early start to the morning and project. I made him some oatmeal and a Latte for myself and began my preparations. First I had to get my self ready, Hair out of face. Check. Chicken apron with dish towel. Check. I re read the recipe and pulled out all of the ingredients and accoutrements needed.

Here is my bread making gear!

I like to lay everything I will need for a complicated recipe out before I begin, just to make sure I haven't missed anything. This is especially helpful for MTAFC recipes as they are long and there isn't usually a master list of thing you need.

" my precious...."

If you  like to cook and have a small kitchen like a do, consider getting one of these book stands. Very helpful. See Alex's Macguyver-ing on the coffee grinder in the background. When our friend Kooj watched our house she noticed lots of little rigs like this.

So I was super prepared and optimist! The majority of the recipe seemed really easy, just a lot of kneading and waiting. took a few shots of the begining, but then I needed both my hands to work and rangle Andrew.

I let it set for the recommended 3 hours, and then 2 more, and then 1 more. 

Nothing happened. I enlisted the help of Alex, who worked for a number of years as a baker in a deli in Boulder. He informed me that I had not kept my bread at 70 degrees and had stifled my yeast.

Alex used a trick of the trade and made a "Proof Box" out of our oven, we continued to try and raise the dough this way.

 

Basically he tried to keep the oven at a humid warm temp.  Alas this still did not work. We decided to see the bread through and finish the recipe even though the dough didn't rise. The bread turned out dense and gummy. No Bon. I tried to make garlic bread out of one of the larger rolls it was pretty gross. I didn't get any pictures because it was like 11:00 at night by the time we were done and I was over it. 

I am going to try again this weekend, I have my awesome once monthly 4 day weekend, so my plan is potty training and bread making. What an exciting life! Actually even though I get a spot of cabin fever after a lot of time at home, I love this time of year when there isn't much going on besides football and its perfectly acceptable to spend an entire weekend in Jammies in the house. 

Julia said in her master recipe that you really have to keep trying in order to get the bread recipe right, you may have to make adjustment and tweaks.  I think that my problem was that I used high altitude flour out of habit and didn't adjust the amount of yeast.

Here's to hoping my next batch is somewhat edible. -MB