Cooking With The Wolfes

Rosemary French Bread

Every once in awhile, even the best cooks have a misadventure in the kitchen. While I don't claim to be the "best" at cooking, I certainly had an adventure with this bread, if not a MISadventure. I found this recipe on allrecipes.com, but it was originally meant to be done completely in the bread machine. Well, in my book, french bread cannot be square, so I decided to have the dough mix in the bread machine and follow directions for rolling up and baking the bread in the oven, taken from a recipe for plain 'ol french bread. Thus begins the adventure.

I put the ingredients in the bread machine and set it to start. A minute later, I take a peek to see how the dough is mixing up, and instead of a shiny ball of dough, I see something resembling flour soup. So I tried adding flour in small increments until I had added at least a half-cup more. Okay, crisis averted.

Or not.

I happened to glance at the bag of flour on the counter and realized that I had used AP flour, not bread flour. DOH! I guess that had something to do with it. The flour/liquid ratios sounded about right to me in the original recipe.

The dough finally came out of the bread maker and looked pretty normal to me. I had never done the traditional rolling up the dough to make a French loaf, but it was pretty uneventful. The second one came out of the oven looking a lot better, though, so I guess practice makes perfect!

fresh out of the oven!

With spaghetti, meat sauce (pulled out of the freezer from the last time I made meat sauce), and green beans. I realized too late that I didn't have the ingredients to make the traditional spaghetti side dish - salad. You can tell this is my plate because you can see the spaghetti peeking out from under the sauce - if this was Mike's (aka Mr. Picky), it would be sans pasta.

The thing about making bread at home is, I like to have the leftovers the next morning, slathered with Canadian honey or my mom's homemade jam. So, if I'm going to make a savory bread, it had better be really savory to justify not being able to eat in the a.m. This bread was just mild enough to tease me into wondering if it would be good for breakfast. And for all those curious minds that just have to know, the answer is...not so much. Maybe it would have been more strongly flavored if I hadn't had to add so much extra flour. I definitely plan on playing with the recipe and making French bread again!



p.s. - I don't know why Blogger is making parts of this post all funky, but if I could figure out how to fix it, I would! Sorry 'bout that.