WWW.MOTHEREARTHNEWS.COM 37Basic French Bread Recipe
In 1708, when this recipe was published, eggs were backyard eggs, milk was raw,
and butter was freshly churned. The white flour was slightly less white than ours
today, but not by enough to matter. I have backyard chickens that lay eggs with such
rich, dark yolks that when I serve this bread, friends sometimes ask, “Why is this
bread so yellow?”
To be honest, I have only just started using the sugar and full complement of salt.
I’m loving it! I hope you’ll find a new appreciation for yeasted, lightly enriched breads
and for the American loaf bread tradition. Yield: 1 loaf.
Directions: In a bowl, add flour and optional salt, mix, and set aside. In another
bowl, break eggs, add optional sugar, then mix and set aside.
In a small saucepan, add the milk and softened
butter, broken into small pieces. Warm to 110 to
115 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir to help the butter
melt. Add the warm milk and yeast to the beaten
eggs and mix.
Set a “sponge” (pre-ferment) by adding about 1
cup of the flour/salt mixture to the egg mixture to
form a batter. Mix until smooth. Dust with flour, cov-
er, and set aside in a warm place. Add the rest of the
flour mixture when the sponge is clearly active, has
risen, and the dusting of flour has cracked. Form into
a rough mass by hand or with a mixer. Historically,
this bread was not kneaded, giving it a cakey texture.
Cover and set aside in a warm place to double in size.
When doubled, remove to a lightly floured counter. Then, gently pressing with your
hands or working gently with a rolling pin, form a perfect rectangle the length of the
tin and twice as wide. Roll into a cylinder and place seam side down in a well-buttered
baking tin, 10 inches by 4.25 inches by 3 inches. Cover, and set aside in a warm place
until dough has risen just above top of the pan. For a shiny crust, brush with a beaten
egg. Bake for 40 minutes in an oven set at 350 degrees. Remove from the oven, tip
the loaf out of the pan, and set it on a rack. Wait 2 hours, until the bread has cooled,
to cut and serve.Ingredients- 4 cups (21 ounces)
unbleached white flour - 11 ⁄ 2 tsp salt (optional)
- 3 eggs
- 2 tbsp sugar (if making
American variation) - 1 cup warm milk
- 2 tbsp unsalted butter,
softened - 21 ⁄ 4 tsp yeast
riched with butter, eggs, and milk, and
leavened with yeast. Cookbook authors
from the 1600s and 1700s called those
loaves “French bread,” and later authors
called them “French rolls.” In their soft-
ness and subtlety of flavor, they remind-
ed us of the sensuous sophistication of
French food in particular, and of French
culture more generally.
While this “French bread” fell out
of fashion, it never went away. If you
break American bread recipes down
to their underlying ingredient ra-
tios — how much milk to flour or fat to
flour — you’ll find that we never aban-
doned the French bread of previousBecause this bread isn’t kneaded, it has
an almost cake-like texture. It’s a bread
meant for homemade jam and butter. (See
directions for hand-churned butter, Page 38.)p 36-39 French Bread.indd 37 10/11/16 8:44 AM