The Country Dish

Whether you’re new to home bread baking, or just have limited time or ingredients, this Simple French Bread is the easiest loaf of bread you’ll ever make! You only need four simple ingredients — and one of them is water!

A quick word about kitchen equipment…

It’s no secret that I love kitchen gadgets…it’s a sort of addiction. But, I’ll admit, that, generally speaking, one gets the fabulous new item home, only to discover that it’s not quite so fabulous after all – your pineapple slicer brutalizes the pineapple into unrecognizable pulp; the v-shaped cutter works fine, but you realize that you’re never likely to need any foods cut into a v-shape within your lifetime; the apple slicer works great once you can remember where you stuck it, and with only slightly more clean-up and trouble than cutting the apple up with a knife would have been; and that handy countertop nut chopper only serves to deprive the cat of the joy of chasing the occasional errant almond as it skitters madly away from your chef’s knife and flies across the kitchen floor like a tiny, crazed mouse.

Then there was that time I almost put my eye out when a pastry cutter flew apart in mid-pie-crust. True story. You know that expression, “it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye”? Yeah. Perhaps it was a just punishment for being too lazy to clean the food processor. I stubbornly still tend to grab the pastry cutter though; I’m no quitter. I guess because I didn’t actually lose the eye. And I still hate cleaning the food processor. My mom insists the fork method is better, and she still has both her eyes at age 73, and after a lifetime of making thousands of, quite literally, the world’s best pie-crusts, so she’s probably right. Mothers usually are, I fear.

Really, the main problem is that most of these items have only one dedicated purpose, and, unless you eat more pineapple than Shawn and Gus, or have an extreme penchant for fancy, v-shaped things, they’re mostly soon to be relegated to the role of dust catcher, or, even more likely, the role of “what is that thing that’s keeping the kitchen drawer from opening all the way?!”

However, I digress. My point is that after many years of trial and error – of clawing my way out of the depths of despair, also known as a chocolate-melter full of seized up chocolate (I should have just stuck to microwaving it like the pioneers did), all the way to scaling the heights of culinary ecstasy with my handheld electric blender… err, that may have come out a bit more suggestively than intended, but if you’ve ever had cream cheese that refused to melt smoothly into something, you know what I mean – I have found that there are very few kitchen gadgets / small appliances that I really use on any sort of regular basis. The three biggies that really come to mind are: my beloved Blendtec blender, my KitchenAid stand mixer, and, believe it or not, my bread machine.

The bread machine is often much-maligned as the frivolous antithesis of a healthy lifestyle and diet, but, let’s face it – we all come crawling back to bread at some point. Making your own just allows you the ability to make healthier, better tasting bread — such as today’s Simple French Bread.

During this pandemic, many home cooks are trying their hand at bread making for the first time, with an emphasis on artisan sourdough – which is a great deal like trying to run before you can walk. If you want to satisfaction of making a delicious tasting and smelling loaf of bread that your family ooohs and ahhhs about on your first try, you should start with a simple, yeasted bread like the one I’m going to share with you today. If you really want to take the guesswork out of it, invest in a cheap bread machine. As long as it has a “dough” cycle (meaning, the ability to mix and proof in the machine without baking), it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I think the last two I purchased were Sunbeam brand on Amazon for around $50.

That being said, this Simple French Bread can also be easily made in a stand mixer, or even by hand.

Now, let’s get to baking…

So, assuming you now have your shiny, new bread machine (instructions for making by hand are included on recipe card below), the only other things you need are: water, salt, flour (any kind of white all-purpose or bread flour), and instant yeast (I very much prefer SAF brand, but I suppose any brand will do as long as it’s instant). You should also have some sort of sheet pan, butter, and parchment paper (optional, but nice) on hand.

Now, make sure that the paddle attachment is in place in the bottom of your machine’s mixing bowl, and layer the ingredients in the order given.

Simple French Bread

• 1 1/4 c. water (out of the cold tap, the machine will heat it up a bit)
• 1 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3 c. flour
• 2 tsp. instant yeast

It will look like this:

At this point, just snap the mixing bowl into the machine, close the lid, start the “dough” setting, and walk away ’til it beeps. Mine takes 1½ hours, but they vary a bit. In the meantime, get a sheet pan ready by either lining it with a piece of parchment or buttering a 6” x 14” strip. Personally, I love parchment paper because you can just toss it when you’re done and the pan stays clean.

When the timer goes off, pre-heat your oven to 400F, and make sure you have a nice, clean space on your counter to shape your dough. If your dough seems a little sticky, you can sprinkle a bit of flour on the board. Then, next time, remember to add ¼ cup more flour to the mix, or decrease the water by ¼ cup. Or, if it’s a bit dry, try adding ¼ cup more water next time. Every flour absorbs water differently, depending on the brand, whether it’s bread flour or all-purpose flour, bleached of unbleached. Once you get it dialed in just right for your particular flour, the dough should be soft, but not sticky.

Now upend your mixing bowl and plonk your glob of dough down on your work board. Using your fingers, gently press it into a rectangle roughly 6” x 12”-14”.

Roll it up starting on a long side, and pinch the seam so that it won’t unfurl during baking. Place your lovely little log of dough, seam-side down, on your prepared pan, and let it rise in a warm spot in your kitchen until just about doubled (or until the dough immediately fills in the dent when it’s poked) – usually 15 to 20 minutes in my kitchen. Better to bake it a little soon, rather than wait too long.

When your dough looks beautifully puffy, quickly slash the top a few times with a very sharp knife.

Bake at 400F for 20 minutes. Don’t worry that it’s not terribly browned – this recipe stays fairly pale. And if you butter the crust right after removing it from the oven, it will stay soft. For best results, allow to cool most of the way before cutting.

While I have many delicious variations you can make with a similar methodology, homemade bread-makin’ just doesn’t get any easier than this. So go ahead, impress your family with a fresh loaf of this delicious Simple French Bread tonight!

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