French Bread: The Complete Saga

Now that I've had some sleep, let me retell the story of my attempt to make French Bread.

I've been wanting to try my new breadmaker, so Saturday afternoon I went to the grocery store and got all the stuff. I decided to try the French Bread recipe. It was 5 when I started, but since I didn't have to leave until 8 I figured I had plenty of time.

I mixed it up, and set the cycle. An hour passed. I started getting worried. So I got out the instruction manual and looked up what those numbers on the display actually meant.

Nuts. 3 hours might be cutting it close. It took that long just to knead and rise and then knead again, and I didn't want it baking while no one was home. By 8:00 it still had a half hour to rise before the baking cycle. I stopped the machine and unplugged it, and hoped it wouldn't rise too much by the time I got home again.

I got home from the movie, and while the dough was, er substantially larger than when I left, it was still all in the bread machine. I punched it back down and tried to find a pan to bake it in. We don't have any bread pans, so I tossed that sucker in an 8X8 brownie pan (This required more punching. Good thing I took that self defense class) and put it in the oven. This was about 11:30.

After an hour I took it out, got a spatula and that sucker popped right out of the pan and landed on the counter with an incredible CRACK. If you want to know what it sounded like, grab a brick, hold it over your head, and then let it drop on the counter top.

"Oh no!" I thought to myself, "this sucker is hard as a rock."

"See what the inside is like" my roomie, we'll call her Nita, suggested.

I found the biggest knife we had. I attempted to cut a slice, but this only annoyed the bread. I started sawing furiously, then I started chopping, then a samurai swing. Finally, by pushing down on the knife with both hands and most of my body weight, I managed to get a piece.

The inside was soft, fluffy, and delicious.

I've invented the lobster of breadstuffs.

I ate my piece like a corn on the cob. I held the crust in my hands and gnawed the bread off it. Nita was a little braver and actually attempted to eat the crust. We had to turn the volume up on the tv. Chewing that stuff made the most incredible racket.

So for my next attempt, I'll go for regular bread, and make sure I have plenty of time to leave it in the machine from start to finish.

We were also a wee bit late to church today.