I needed to make french bread baguettes today. I needed them for my husbands best french toast recipe, for the french onion soup I have been making today and for our Christmas Day fondue. These loaves are from a recipe I sort of made up today. I use a lot of buttermilk in my cooking because my husband likes to have it in the fridge at all times. It makes a “cheater” sourdough. Soon I will post how to make sourdough french, without a mother.
People have asked that I lay out the recipe and go thru the steps so they could make it when they have never made bread before. I will attempt to do just that, knowing how many epic fails I have had, in my journey to make a decent bread. I would expect it for yourself, but I will do my best to help prevent that.
My disclaimer- I am not pro. I work full time as a nurse and usually only bake on the weekends. I like to bake, I love a good loaf of bread, I love sweet breads. So I have been trying to make what I love for the length of my marriage (22 years). My husband appreciates everything homemade and cheers me on with every success and failure.
When I started making bread it was a bit of a mess. I had made a successful focaccia bread in the past but making a sandwich loaf was a lot more daunting. My mother made bread alot and when she was growing up they made it 2 times a week. My husband bought me a bread machine for Christmas one year. I didn’t want to use the bread making packages from the grocer (due to the expense), so I spent a lot of time trying to get things right using the recipes in the product manual. Using those recipes at my altitude (approximately 9000 feet) did not work. I spent a lot of time experimenting with high altitude adjustments and had not great luck. I had doughy or wet insides, crater tops, big holes, uncooked middles, my loaves were crumbly and difficult to use for a sandwich. It was disappointing to say the least. I threw out a lot of crappy bread. I started I using the bread machine to mix and then removed it to form and cook the loaf in my oven. Kneading dough is time consuming and worse for me, because I have arthritis in my hands. A hard day of kneading could put me in pain for several days. Kneading dough is how I diagnosed my arthritis. I read a lot about how to make bread and it is crazy how many different instructions you can find. I used the troubleshooting guides and eventually I started having less and less for the garbage. After a time I started saving my bread disasters in the freezer for my husbands home made stuffing,(By the way, bread disasters make for great stuffing). My bread machine broke a few months after my husband bought me a KitchenAid stand mixer, (another Christmas present), one with enough power to knead bread dough. After that I didn’t seem to use the bread machine very much anyway. I never did replace that bread maker and there has been no looking back.
I started getting a look to my dough that was desirable and seemed to make for the right consistency and a decent finished product. As hard as bread can seem, once you know what you are looking for you can really change up ingredients as long as you have the right mix of wet and dry ingredients. I rarely seem to follow a recipe any more. My old standby recipes I have used so many times that i never have to think about it anymore. I know what I want and I get ideas from other recipes and then I go it alone. My hot chili cheddar bread is a good example of that. Another is my apricot sweet bread.
My other obsessions are making a perfect pie and pie crust (also different at altitude) fresh made cookies, lefse, natural ingredients, making from scratch, cutting back on foods with preservatives, economical homemaking, sustainable living, repurposing junk, quilting, jewelry making, crochet and knitting.
