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Baking Bread: Sourdough French Bread

Making bread is fun!

That is certainly not what I used to think though! Working with yeast scared me. And working with sticky dough even more!

Today’s bake is a sourdough french bread that I could use to make garlic bread.

I found a recipe for Sourdough french bread at Taste of Home.

I owe a lot to Taste of Home magazine. Reading through this magazine and then trying the recipes that looked interesting (and a few of its fellow magazines like Simple and Delicious and Light and Tasty) is how I learned to cook.

I had no idea how to cook when I got married 14 years ago. Yes, you should feel bad for Josh. I had many disasters!

We’ve come a long way since then. And even Josh knows how to cook now. He’s been busy working overtime for the past week though so I’ve been trying to make yummy dinners for him when he gets home. Not today though. Today we are going to our nephew’s birthday party! And we are bringing garlic bread.

I started my dough around 10:30 AM today.

My dough is all ready to rise for the next hour and a half.
This is about 20 minutes into rising time. I turned my oven on to 250 degrees F for about 5 minutes so that the dough would have a happy place to rise.
This is my dough after an hour and a half. This is a beautiful thing to see!
The dough was a little bit sticky but not impossible to work with once I got it out of the bowl.
I’m still learning about how slashing dough works. I might not have slashed these deep enough. Also, the lower loaf is a bit odd-looking. Since the dough was a little sticky, I had a hard time shaping it the way I wanted.

One thing I learned that I definitely need: a bench knife.  The crinkle cutter just doesn’t get all the dough off the wooden table I use for making bread.

I ended up with gorgeous-looking loaves anyway! Instead of using a cornstarch wash as the recipe states, I just brushed the tops of the loaves with egg white.
This looks like a good crumb.

I think I was finished with the loaves by around 1:30 to 2 PM. Not too bad on time.

My boys were actually disappointed that I was turning these loaves into garlic bread! They wanted to eat it just like it was. In fact, they kept trying to finagle more slices to “taste test.”

This pic doesn’t show how soft these loaves are. After I sliced them in half, I wanted to pillow my head on them!

I spread on some butter and sprinkled garlic salt and grated parmesan on each half loaf. Hopefully, I didn’t go overboard with the garlic salt. I probably should have just gone with garlic powder! Two of my middle children didn’t mind the garlic salt though. They loved it. My oldest told me it was too salty. As long as the kids eat the bread, I’ll be happy. There will be 12 children (all family) at the party after all! That’s a lot of little mouths! That many children makes for a lot of fun. 🙂

-Lynn

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