World Bread Day 09--BBA French Bread

It's World Bread Day! This event, created by Zorra at 1xumruhren bitte, oday bakers all over the world have baked loaves upon loaves to honor the art of artisan breadmaking. And in case you were wondering, artisan means hand-made. So every homemade loaf is artisan bread, even though usually most people use the term in reference to crusty, rustic, or sourdough loaves. You know, the fancy kind.
It had been awhile since I made any bread for my Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge, and I figured the timing was perfect. Next up is the classic, too--French Bread. Only four ingredients, yet it's an exacting, tricky, and delicate bread. And a harsh mistress, I learned. I didn't have much hope for the recipe being incredibly accurate, after all the adjustments I've had to make, so I started with the basics, leaving the dough as wet as possible at every opportunity.
One of French bread's greatest attributes is its light, airy texture. There are a couple of causes for bread to be this way. One, the long preferment. Using a starter--a biga, poolish, sourdough, or even a pate fermentee like this recipe--develops flavor, acidity, and allows the dough to have a more open crumb. Pate fermentee is flour, water, yeast, and salt, mixed and allowed to sit in the fridge for a day before you need it. In this time, all those wonderful things happen in the oduhg that provide wonderful flavors and textures when added to the rest of the dough in the recipe.
In this case, it also allows you to make the pate a day ahead, then compleye the french bread in aone day. Quite convenient!
Most importnatly I think is the hydration level. All open-crumbed breads have a very high hydration level--they have a lot of water in relationship to teh amunt of flour. Some really holey breads like the Ciabatta have as high as 80% water to flour--a very sticky, sloppy dough that's very hard to work with. French bread isn't that high--but it's still mighty slack. I was a little confused when Reinhart directed that the dough should be tacky, not sicky--in my experience, it should be quite sticky. I would have had to add a bunch of flour to get it to the tacky stage, so I held back, left it pretty wet.
It's another important element of these breads to handle them properly--gingerly. After the initial kneading, you don't want to manhandle these doughs. Let them rise, deflate and fold only when directed, because it's the open, airy texture you're trying to keep, and that is of course created by lots of long, slow rises. I have found that the best way to insure you're not jerking the duog around in the final stage--because usually you're not putting these in to a bread pan and moving them that way--is to place them on a sheet of parchment, on a peel, ready to be transferred.
My bread...well, I don't think my oven was quite hot enough. I should have gotten a better rise, and a darker crust with the coveted "ears" that come when the dough gets its ovenspring. Not quite there this time, unfortunately. I considered baking it in my Dutch oven, like a no-knead, since I just made a half batch and one boule. In hindsight, I think it would have helped.
But even given all the imperfections, it was still pretty good bread. It had an open crumb, nice and irregular. Chewy, with a nice depth of flavor--it tasted like bread. So I can't complain too much. French Bread is a difficult recipe to master, with so few ingredients, the technique becomes very important. So I'll try it again--this is one I won't mind spending some time to get right.
The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge was created by Nicole at Pinch My Salt.