Yeah, I know…I’m about the 931,834,762 person to make the batard joke. I just can’t help it, folks. Anyway, this month’s Daring Bakers challenge was an incredibly intimidating recipe for French Bread from Julia Child. Go ahead and look; it’s pretty scary (11 pages!). Like several others, I grumbled at the length of time it would take to make the bread…most reports back were marking the total time to be on the order of 8-10 hours. Yikes! I put it off for weeks, and finally ended up using a trick to cut the time down by about 5 hours.
Although I have very little experience baking bread, I’d heard about retarding dough overnight in the fridge, so the fermentation occurs slowly. The literature I’d seen, however, seemed divided on whether it was okay to retard after the loaves had been shaped, or on the very first rise. Not having anyone of authority to ask, I decided to throw caution to the wind and let the dough ferment overnight on its first rise, mainly because that was the longest one at 3-5 hours. I started making the dough around 10:00 or 10:30pm and took it out of the fridge around 9:30am the next day, letting it warm up a bit on a radiator that was covered with a towel. I then proceeded with the second and third fermentations as usual.
Resting the dough before shaping