I Stand Corrected . . . also, this tastes AMAZING!

I have to admit that, while I was waiting for the dough to rise this morning, I thought a number of not very kind things about Confessions of a French Baker by Peter Mayle.  The book purports to be a guide to baking loaves like a professional, artisanal French baker, aimed at an audience of regular people, like me.  Or maybe not.  Although the first chapters of the book linger over the romance of bakers arriving to work well before dawn to lovingly craft their loaves and the smell and feel of yeasty dough being shaped into perfect baguettes, batards, and boules, it does not give much space to what I consider the much more important aspects of bread-making: ratios of ingredients, kneading technique and length of time, and rising periods.  In fact, the recipes contained in the second half of this book almost universally call for both mixing and kneading the dough in an electric mixer.  I have always been of the opinion that anything that can be made with a mixer can also be made by hand (see Thursday's post), although sometimes it requires more effort, so I simply made these recipes the old fashioned way.  But I have never achieved completely satisfactory results. 

Over the past few months since I checked this book out of the library, I have been experimenting with its recipes, particularly the baguette recipe, and have come to the conclusion that the measurements did not survive the translation from French to English and from European to American measuring systems unscathed.  I find that I consistently need to add more water, and that my dough often doesn't rise nearly as much was one would expect from dough with such an obscene amount of yeast in it. (4.5 teaspoons? Really?)  Today, while I was waiting - and waiting - for my most recent batch of dough to rise, I began to wonder if it really did make a difference whether I mixed and kneaded the dough by hand or in a mixer.  Maybe I'm not strong enough to mix really stiff dough by hand, and that's why I'd been adding extra water.  Maybe, 15 minutes of kneading in a mixer is actually equivalent to more like 25 minutes of kneading by hand, which seems like a lot, but some of these doughs have been really tough.  I even formulated an experiment in which I would go to the home of a friend who has a stand-up mixer and make bread solely by machine for a day. 

All this is really just another way of saying that I was doubting Confessions of a French Baker and thinking that I would never get a really good loaf of bread from its recipes.  Today it proved me wrong. 

I decided to try garlic french bread, a variation on the traditional batard in which you add 6 chopped cloves of garlic to the dough before kneading.  The recipe was indecisive about whether the garlic out to be cooked first - in one section it called for sauteed garlic, while in the instructions it said simply to chop the garlic and add it to the dough.  I love roasted garlic and dislike raw garlic, so I decided to roast mine in the toaster oven before adding it to the dough.  I ended up needing about a 1/2 cup more water than the recipe required, plus a little extra salt, and there was so much yeast that the yeast was actually falling out of the dough as I was kneading it, although it slowly dissolved in.  Even though I had added a little extra water, the dough was very dry and very tough to knead.  I kneaded it for about 15 minutes, until I was completely sick of it, and put it in a bowl in the slightly warm oven to rise. 

Every rising period seemed to take ages longer than expected, and the dough just barely doubled in size.  In short, it had none of the fabulous airiness I've come to expect from dough that has risen multiple times.    Once I had formed the dough into batards, I decided to let it proof for as long as it needed to start to breathe a little.  At that point, I didn't really care if the loaves came out small as long as they weren't unbearably dense.  Really dense bread just isn't fun to eat.  I ended up letting the dough proof for over an hour on top of the preheating oven, and although it didn't double in size it did get noticeably fluffier.  I cut the dough into leaf shapes for fun, then sprayed the loaves and the inside of the oven and popped the loaves in.  About ten minutes in I sprayed the oven again.  After about twenty minutes, I turned the heat down from 450 to 400 degrees, afraid that the loaves were browning too much on top.

What came out of the oven were savory, not-too-dense, crisp-crusted loaves of french bread, with a strong hint of garlic.  They are absolutely delicious with butter slathered on top, and I can't wait to try them with cheese!  I'm not sure how these loaves came out of that not very promising dough, but I can only assume that that dough needs a much longer rising period (and possibly higher room temperatures) than others.  The loaves are still not as airy as I'd like them to be, but not nearly as dense as I'd feared.  I'm also completely sold on roasting the garlic first.  Although the taste is not as strong as it would have been if I had used raw garlic, the softness of roasted garlic allows the flavor to spread throughout the loaf, rather than being captured in pockets of garlic.  In the future, I may try this recipe again with more like 10 cloves of roasted garlic.  I am also going forward with the mixer experiment (if my friend agrees, and who wouldn't want someone baking in their house all day?)  More updates to follow . . .