Saturday, April 24, 2010

The Right Recipe

My daughter made up a little ditty in honour of the Atkins diet (to the tune of "Frere Jacques"):

Carbohydrates, carbohydrates,

Make you fat, make you fat!

If you want to be thin, if you want to be thin,

Then eat meat. Then eat meat.

I've been making a lot of bread. I can't shake that tune from my head.


I finally decided to try the "French Bread" recipe that came with the French Loaf Pan I got from Williams-Sonoma. You know, the one I ranted about...

I baked these on Tuesday:
From Bread


From Bread


And these came out of the oven ten minutes ago:
From Bread


Compare with the recipe I developed:
From Bread

Mine aren't bad, but they're a little pale. And they were a little drier too.

Actually, the recipes aren't that different. I only realized that this week, when I looked it over to try it. I think the big difference is brushing egg white on the loaves before baking. I've been over-baking mine, trying to get them nicely browned. I'm going to retry my recipe in the next week or so and see if brushing egg on them makes the difference.

Here's to carbohydrates!

From Bread

6 comments:

freedomnan said...

Looking good!

Shan said...

We're your kidneys, here to tell you
Meat is bad, meat is bad
Moderation's simple, if you only practice
Spurn the fads, spurn the fads.

freedomnan said...

Did your new recipe have the "spritz the oven with water several times during baking to crisp the crust" instructions?

Ames said...

That was some mighty fine bread.

Gwen said...

Shan - good one.

Gwen said...

Okay, I made my first-ever French bread in honour of your birthday. I don't have the proper pan, but they still turned out AWESOME. I didn't actually spritz the oven, or put any water in it, but I did brush the loaves with egg white, and cover the rising (shaped) loaves with a damp tea towel. It worked pretty well.