Comment to Cousin J

This began as a comment to a post on Cousin J's blog.  She is going to start a project during which time she will make, instead of buy, all the bread  for her family for 40 days.  She will use all sorts of methods and recipes...using the bread machine when she wants/needs to.  My comment started getting ridiculously long, so I decided to post it on my blog, instead.

Oooh, I love homemade bread, too.  I used to make it fairly frequently, but then couldn't quit eating it.  Warm homemade bread and plenty of butter!  How good is that?  I couldn't even let it cool.  Maybe 10 minutes out of the oven was all I could wait.  Oh. my. god!  There is nothing like it. But mine was just plain old homemade bread.  That was in the long ago days before I took us off of white bread.

I did have a french bread recipe that came with an EKCO bread pan that looked like a rounded "W".  The recipe made two loaves...one for each side of the W.  I came across the bread pan a while back and wanted to make some french bread because I remembered we liked it a lot and it seemed like it was a bit faster than my other bread recipe. (Notice, no plural...I really didn't experiment much!)   I tore through lots of possible places for the recipe (choking on dust, occasionally), but never found it.  I knew it was probably still lurking here somewhere because that recipe was not something I would have thrown away.  I couldn't have discarded it accidentally either, because it was printed on heavy sort of magazine slick paper that was almost the size of a road map.

A couple of nights ago, in my shredding/dusting/vacuuming mode in my bedroom, I found it in one of the big plastic containers that had old prospectus (how do you make that a plural?) and charity requests (not the word I'm looking for) and drug monographs and lots of other paper & envelopes.  In the three or so containers I've already gone through, everything has been shredded or tossed with the exception of a few things I will go through later that now reside in one file folder.

Anyway, back to the recipe.  As I said, I found it upstairs in my bedroom among all that other stuff.  Weird.  So I took it to the printer and made a copy.  It's so big that even folded in fourths, the whole piece wouldn't fit on the printer.  No problem.  I copied the part I needed and then typed it into the Master Cook program that I have and printed out that recipe.  On the original recipe I had penciled in new amounts of ingredients.  Evidently, and I don't remember this, I felt like the loaves needed to be a little bigger, so I increased the amounts to 1 1/2 of the original.  In Master Cook I saved the original recipe and then adjusted the ingredient amounts and saved that one too.  I printed both recipes and placed them in a sheet protector with the EKCO  sheet between them.  Now I just need to get my cookbook fixed and things will be right with the world.

My cookbook (my notebook with all the recipes I have typed into Master Cook) fell apart recently and it makes me crazy to have to deal with it.  Yesterday I stopped at Walmart and bought 3 smaller notebooks with the idea that I would have a separate notebook for three different groups of recipes.  I haven't worked out what's going where and the number "3" was arbitrary anyway.  The notebooks are heavy-duty and were over $6 apiece and I just didn't want to buy a 4th one because I was being cheap at the time.  So there's a new project for me.  I just need to think about it a bit. And maybe buy another notebook.

And Cousin J, here is the recipe.  I'm pretty sure you don't have to have the special bread pan, although I wonder if one can be found on eBay.  I just looked on eBay and found it here and it's exactly the one I have. The recipes are on the back of the paper that's covering the pan.

French Bread


1 package dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water, 105-115 degrees
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 tablespoon butter or margarine
4 1/4 to 4 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons cornmeal

In a large mixing bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water.

Add sugar, salt, butter, and 2 cups flour.  Beat with a spoon until thoroughly mixed.  Gradually add remaining flour until dough is easy to handle.

Knead on a lightly floured surface for five to ten minutes or until dough is elastic and not sticky.

Place in a greased bowl; cover dough with plastic wrap.  Let rise in a warm place until double in size, 1 to 1 1/4 hours.

Punch down and place on a lightly floured surface.  Divide into two equal pieces.

Shape each piece into a long narrow loaf, about 14" long and 1 1/2" in diameter.

Lightly grease inside of EKCO French Bread Pan.  Sprinkle 1 tsp. cornmeal in each section.  Shake pan to distribute evenly.

Place loaves in pan.  Make sure the loaves do not come any closer than 1 1/2" to ends of the pan.  With a sharp knife, make three or four diagonal 1/4" deep slashes on the top of each loaf.  Do not cover.  Let rise in a warm place until double in size, about 45 minutes.

Bake in preheated 375 degree oven for 25-30 minutes.  Remove from pan at once.