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

The next two fermentations went well and as expected, although I think the last one might have been somewhat negatively influenced by the heat of the radiator, since they grew quite large and as a result my pain d’epi was very fat and difficult to cut (hence its funky, rough-hewn shape).

Other small problems: to create steam, I put a baking pan on the bottom of my oven and filled it with ice cubes, then poured water on them right before putting the loaves in. However, I think my oven took a little too long to get back up to 450°, even though I tried to insert the loaves and water as quickly as possible. Because of this, I think the crust was a bit less brown and crispy than it could have been (although still reasonably crispy). Finally, since the digital scale was missing, I had to eyeball the amounts of fresh yeast with an analogue scale for which the smallest increment was 1oz. I’m not sure if it was a slight misjudgement on measuring the yeast, or due to my experiment with overnight fermentation, but the breads (especially the epi, not so much the batards) tasted a teeny bit too yeasty. A friend who I donated a batard to didn’t notice this, so I might have been hyper-sensitive to this since I’m usually more critical of my cooking than others are.

So, to summarize:

Allowed changes/errors I made:

1. Fermented dough in the fridge overnight for its first rise, about 11 hours. Let it warm up to room temp for about 1 1/2 hours before proceeding with the recipe.
2. Eyeballed amount of fresh yeast, possibly used too much which resulted in very slight yeasty flavor.
3. Oven took far to long to get back to 450° after loading the bread/creating the steam.

Despite all this, I was really happy with the result! The crumb was lovely, soft and with some very nice (if not huge) holes, and with just the right amount of salty flavor. My friends who tried it also said that it was good and definitely better than supermarket baguettes.

After having made the bread once, I see how much potential it has for being outstanding, since it was so good despite all my bloopers. I would love to try the recipe again with a more carefully-measured cake of yeast and the guidance of someone who knows a little more about fridge fermentation, which would probably bring this bread pretty close to perfection. Also, the PBS videos of Julia Child and Danielle Forestier were indispensable for technique (and for bringing a wee tear to my eye for the wonderful Julia).

Thanks so much to Mary of Breadchick and Sara of I Like To Cook for the challenge! I’m so glad for not sitting this one out. It was a fantastic learning experience and reminded me that this is just the sort of challenge that made me join this baking club. My experience was tested, but I came out in good shape and with a heck of a lot more confidence! As always, I’ll be looking forward to next month’s challenge…

Posted by the cookworm on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 11:34 am.