I love French Bread, in my opinion it is the best bread you can make/buy. The texture is wonderful and the taste is very flavorful. I cannot stand those vendors and stores that try and pass off that soft crust crap they call French bread. True French bread has a hard crust with a soft and textural interior. These recipes are the absolute best I have found for making French bread. They come from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking Volume Two. The whole recipe for bread is about 12 pages long. I have typed up a one page summary that is much easier to understand. I have made a recipe for both the Baguettes and Boules. Baguettes are of course the long loaves and the Boules (pronounced like "bulls") are the classic round loaves. Both recipes are exactly the same except for the forming of the loaves. The forming of the Boules is pretty simple to understand. However, the method for forming of the baguettes is very challenging to try to explain on one page. As a matter of fact in the book it is like three pages. So I think the best way to describe it is to let Julia Child show you herself. DO NOT DISREGARD THIS STEP, IT IS CRUCIAL TO MAKING BAGUETTES. Below, if you click on the picture, you will be taken to YouTube where I have found the French Bread episode of her show "The French Chef". I will warn you, the recipes I have provided below are made using a stand mixer and dough hook which is faster and more efficient, but, in the video, Julia mixes and kneads the dough by hand which is how it is described in the book as well. I have made the bread this way and it has an entirely different texture if you do it in a stand mixer. So, when you watch the video, if you want to just see the forming of the loaves, skip ahead to 12:30 in the show, that way you are not confused about kneading the dough by hand. So just follow the directions in the recipes I have provided and then if you are making the baguettes watch the video and skip ahead to 12:30. Also, another thing I want to clarify is that these breads are baked using a "simulated baker's oven". This is achieved by lining your oven rack with square red stone quarry/floor tiles. You bake the bread directly one these tiles. It provides the extreme heat needed to harden the crust and give it a nice color and taste. You can buy these tiles at a hardware or home improvement store like Lowe's or Home Depot. In fact, I lucked out and bought some at a yard sale. For a standard oven I can only fit about 6. But ovens vary so I would buy about 9 or 10. Please try these breads out. They are delicious and they give you the satisfaction of knowing you can make something as elegant as homemade crusty French Bread. Bon Appetit!
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