French Country Bread

Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create sourdough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with sourdough recipes from Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley as well as delicious recipes to use our sourdough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!

Daring Bakers is part of food bloggers/food photographers online obsession.  This particular component includes a monthly baking challenge.  Each month a different host presents the bakers with a recipe and some specific instructions – like “you must hand churn the butter” or “you cannot substitute the flour/nuts unless there is an allergy or it is unavailable in your area.”  They are challenges though, because sometimes it is hard to find the ingredients or they include a baking technique you’ve never tried before…or like this month, they take hour and hours to complete. What I really love about the challenges is a.) some great baker has perfected their recipe and put hundreds of hours of research and testing into it, b.) they share a lifetime of knowledge and explain to you all of the nerdy tips you need to make it perfect, and c.) you always learn something that impresses.

 My sourdough sponge was super easy to start and now that I see how easy and great (and impressive) the bread was, I wonder why I haven’t been doing this for years!  In fact, my third loaf is rising in the kitchen as we speak.  I can’t wait to get home and pop that beautiful bundle of flour, salt and water into the oven.

It is such a perplexing combination of simple and complex.  The ingredients couldn’t be simpler:  flour, water and salt.  And time.  Lots of time.  Easy to see how it became a staple in our diets.  But it is soo complex!  I’ll admit I don’t fully understand how I went from a bowl of wet flour to the beautiful and delicious bread on my table.  You put together these simple ingredients and wait…and wait…and when you come back you have a yeast smelling spongy concoction!  It grows so beautiful and full and really becomes a blob you can be proud of. 

My favorite moment in making this…well there were a few…like kneading the wet sticky dough without flouring the surface.  It was just messy fun.  But my favorite moment was when I made the first slice into the warm bread.  I cut through the crunchy top and found the center nice and soft.  As the heel came free and fell to the side, steam rose up inside the bread and the inside revealed nice big pockets from air bubbles (like in Swiss cheese).  The top of the bread was perfectly cracked and powdered and looked like something from a European bakery.  It was so delicious and so impressive – I can’t wait to get home to put that third loaf in!

The dough was so sticky the spatula stuck to my hand!