French Bread

I've tried making French bread before with the recipe in the Better Homes & Garden cookbook. It turns out okay, but a bit heavier than I think it should. Their bagel recipe is actually really good. One of these days I'll try the bagels with Dough Enhancer, which has helped in other bread I have made recently.

I found a recipe for French bread that is definitely moving in the right direction, although it's still not quite as light as the bread at our local grocery store, Lee's Marketplace.

I'm not going to reproduce the whole recipe here, since she actually goes into quite a bit of detail with all sorts of little tips to help the bread turn out just right, so I recommend following the link above and reading her whole post, but just in case something happens to her page, the ingredients are as follows:

4 cups bread flour
2 tsp active quick rising dry yeast
2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups warm water

I used regular all-purpose white flour, plus a couple tablespoons of Dough Enhancer.

Follow standard breadmaking procedures or if you're feeling meticulous, follow all her directions closely. The main differences are to cook the bread in a Dutch Oven or on a pizza stone and preheat the oven with DO/stone to 450 for an hour and to throw half a cup of water on the oven floor for an uncovered stone or a fourth a cup of water inside the Dutch Oven when you put the bread in. The water will evaporate quickly since it's so hot and the steam in the oven helps get the texture right. I don't understand exactly why humidity helps make the crust crunchier, but I'm not a chemist - I'm a computer guy.

I was in the mood for something a little fancy, so instead of doing two regular looking loaves, I did one big circular braided loaf, and the result is below:

My next experiment with bread in the Dutch Oven may be this Swirled Bread.