A Right Boulanger!

See my bread-making skillz? Jk jk, I'm far better than this.

In the copious amounts of spare time I've had in the past week (haven't even heard from work yet about when I'm supposed to start. That doesn't bother me too much, since no one else, including the adults, have heard from our boss), I've taken up baking bread. I LOVE bread. It's the one thing I tried everywhere I went in Europe (well, along with chocolate, pastries, ice cream, etc. I like sweets too). The best bread I came across (suprise!) was in France. There were the knots of bread filled with olives, or ham and cheese, or tuna and cheese, or pistou in Nice and baguettes in Paris (I feel like I should write something in parenthesis just to keep the one-pair-of-parenthesis-a-sentence trend going). And now that I'm home, and despite the fact that bread in the US is actually quite a bit better than the no-salt-sawdust Tuscan bread, I really want to learn to recreate the wonderfully starchy, glutiny, carby things I ate.

So I made dinner rolls. Cornstalk dinner rolls. They really looked like cornstalks, meaning that you had to rip each "ear" of bread off yourself. And they were delicious. Success! Then came the no-knead bread. It had to rise overnight, then be shaped and cooked in a large cast-iron pot. Didn't have one of those so I used a stainless steel pot, which worked even though the crust was rather thinner and softer than it should have been. But it was also good! Success no. 2! Thennn I attempted a baguette. I definitely let it rise too long, because I wanted to go to the gym. And nothing is more important than my yoga. And I also had no idea how to shape it into a long loaf thing. So as it cooked it spread out instead of up. It didn't form a crust. And when you bit into it, it tasted like pizza dough. As it cooled, it became the texture and hardness of a baseball bat. Sooo baguette fail! Oh well, I guess it's how you learn. Dinner rolls are on the menu for Lauren's barbeque tomorrow. Buttermilk fantails and Parmesan pull-aparts! Oh yeah.