This is my second attempt making French bread. I again followed Reinhart's classic French bread recipe. I wasn't really happy with the taste last time so I let the dough sit in the fridge for three days instead of overnight (his recipe says you can do up to four). I also bought a couple towels just to use for shaping bread and that helped the loaves stay the right shape even though I still had the same difficulty shaping them.
The recipe requires a blast of steam as the loaves first enter the oven, and not having an extra metal pan on hand I decided to use an extra Pyrex casserole dish that promptly exploded in the oven when I started putting water in. I was smart enough to take safety precautions (thanks undergrad chemistry studies) but not smart enough to think that even though the water was near boiling that the temperature difference between the Pyrex and the water was nearly 250 degrees (another reason I switched from biochem to political philosophy). Needless to say, I freed up some space in the cupboard where that Pyrex used to be and ended up using a spray bottle to wet the loaves after I put them in (which was not an ineffective method - definitely somewhere between exploding glass and using a professional grade metal pan).
As for the bread, it's far from French, and I need to work on my scoring skills. It's too heavy to be a baguette and the crust is coming out too thick. But that doesn't mean it's bad - far from it. It's pretty close to the bread we had in Sicily, and with a little work and some sesame seeds I'm pretty sure I can use it to recreate the wonderful flavor of pane palermitano. But it's not French bread because the dough is just too dense, so I'll come back to this to try and make some pane palermitano but I'm going to have to find another recipe to try to sate my cravings for authentic baguettes.
- jmb
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