Le Pain

Thirty years ago I was introduced to Julia Child’s two volume, 1,239 page, treatise on French cooking, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It is impressive; there are detailed instructions for every step of each recipe. Makes you think that French cuisine is tricky; it must be… there are so many details to illustrate. My wife, Barbara, who was then my fiancé, challenged me to master French bread. She yearned for the baguettes she loved in Paris. She lived there for a year after college. The recipe for French bread required only 29 of the 1,239 pages. My previous experience baking bread was while I was in college and I had made it up as I went which explains why I made bricks. My bricks, I mean loaves, came out in various shades of brown but they had a consistent feel: dense and brick-like.

I rolled up my sleeves, studied the text and illustrations in the book, visited the lumber yard and the tile store. I measured and stirred and kneaded and slashed and spritzed and splashed and baked. I baked and practiced and learned and amended. With time and attention paid to the task I found success. With her arms flung around my neck, Barbara showered me with praise, this bread was better than what she had in Paris. We married the following spring. Everybody loves this bread; it is fragrant with a crisp crust and light chewy crumb. Never has a loaf gone stale.

In 1989 I bought Julia Child’s The Way to Cook. This cookbook includes instructions for French bread too. The recipe is only 11 pages long and incorporates new technology invented since the writing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The preparation of the dough is simplified by the use of food processors, a new fangled kitchen appliance. Other aspects of the original recipe were streamlined and simplified. The final product is just as good and the preparation time is less. The level of skill required is also less, letting machines do some of the work. Even with the greater ease of the “new” method I didn’t bake French bread very often. I really saved the extravagance for special occasions.

In the fall of 2006 Mark Bittman a writer for the NY Times revealed to his readers a method for making excellent bread, with the same qualities as Julia Child’s French bread, that had been invented by Jim Leahy of the Sullivan St. Bakery in NYC. The result of Leahy’s recipe is a loaf with a robust crust and an aromatic, chewy and moist crumb. It is delicious. The big deal with Leahy’s recipe is that the skill level needed is minimal and the time invested in making the bread is quite small. A little planning is needed since the dough is made the day before the bread is baked. It takes me 7 minutes, total, to make the dough and clean up after myself. At the other end, I need to be around the house for 3 hours to form the loaf and bake it. I’m not working with the dough for 3 hours but I do need to be there to do the few final steps. I make this bread often. The link below takes you to a web page where you can scroll down a bit to a video showing the process and to the recipe. Want to try it?

http://boards.epicurious.com/message.jspa?messageID=567096&tstart=0

By the way, I was at Dana-Farber today and it was the second visit in a row that I did not need a transfusion.