The recipe called for 6-7 cups of flour. They suggested I only use a couple cups of flour instead of adding it all at once. Then slowly add flour until you've got a very sticky dough and let that rise. You can always add more flour, and as you knead it you will, so don't start with that full amount. Cut it by a tiny fraction, then add slowly until it's a dough that does hold itself together but is very sticky.
I tried that and voila! It came out nice and light and fluffy. Since then I've been playing with that recipe to get the taste right. I've tried Italian bread and Portuguese sweet bread and a basic white bread but never was impressed with the taste of the Italian or white bread. The Portuguese bread is amazing, but again, when I was making it, it was way too dense. This week I'll be altering that recipe with less flour to see if I can perfect it next.
Anyway, tonight I decided to try this one again and altered the flour and salt and yeast amounts. By the time it came out of the oven and I sliced it and took the first bite I was impressed. And I'm NEVER impressed with my own cooking. My own worst critic type thing. Anyway, this is the edited recipe. It makes a small round loaf but you can always form it into a longer thinner loaf for a true French bread loaf. Or you can put it in a loaf pan and have a sandwich type bread to slice once cool for sandwiches. I hope it turns out as great for you as it did for me.
1 and a half teaspoons of yeast
1 cup of warm water - this is important! Water that's too cool or too hot won't activate the yeast!
1 tablespoon of a yeast food - I used brown sugar but you can use honey or white granulated sugar
I put the three ingredients combined in a 2 cup glass measuring cup and mixed gently. I've got one burner on my stove that vents the heat so I put a glass plate on it and put the measuring up on top of that. The heat from the oven when it's on (I had a pot roast in the oven) keeps the water warm enough to really get the yeast going!
Once you have a good head on the yeast it will look like this:
In a separate bowl:
2 cups of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Mix the flour and salt together well. Once there is a foam head on the yeast / water mix, dump it in the flour mix. Make sure it's totally mixed well. If the mixture seems too thin and it's holding itself together you can add flour 1/4 cup at a time. Just make sure you don't over add flour!! The more flour you add, the most dense your bread will be. Once it's a sticky dough that stays together in the bowl with no liquid floating around put the bowl back on the warmed stove or another warm area of the house. I cover mine with a hand towel. It will look like this when you sit it up to rise:
Allow to rise until it's doubled it's size. It can take anywhere from an hour to several hours, depending on how warm the area is that it's sitting. After rising mine went from the size above to this:
Dump onto a hard surface that's covered in flour. This is VERY sticky and messy. If you wear rings, trust me, you want to remove them. I use a spoon to scrape the dough out of the bowl and drop it right on the floured surface. Then put a bit of flour over the dough and start to knead. You'll need to add in more flour as you mix as each time you punch it down it's going to bring that sticky dough from inside the ball to the outside. You don't want to knead it or add so much flour to it though that it becomes unsticky. It should still be sticky after you've kneaded it.
Find another bowl that will easily hold double the amount of dough and then some. Butter the inside of the bowl and drop the dough in. Put the bowl back on the warmed stove or your warm place and cover with the towel again. This rise doesn't take too long, from five minutes to maybe twenty minutes depending on the warmth.
Butter the pan or cookie sheet you plan on baking your bread in. Bake at 350 degrees for roughly a half hour. If you've decided to make the loaf pan bread, I'd suggest dropping the temp to around 325 and cooking a bit longer. Mine took about 30 minutes when I cooked it at 350 degrees in a slightly flattened round ball.
Another tip I was told. If you can control yourself, don't slice until it's had a chance to cool a good bit. Then when you go to cut it, flip the bread over and slice it from the under side. The slices tend to come out cleaner that way!
I rolled some of the dough out that I made on Super Bowl Sunday to use as a pizza crust. Very first time ever I made a home made pizza and everyone went bonkers. Said the crust was the best part of the pizza. I also took some of the dough and made hamburger buns with it. I just rolled them into balls the size of a baseball and then flatted them so they were two to three inches high. I let those rise on the cookie sheet and then popped them in the oven. They came out so nice and light and airy, perfect for the pulled pork BBQ that I made for sandwiches. This is a great, versatile recipe!
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