French Bread and Cheese - It's a Classic

As promised I made my own French bread to go with the cheeses we bought at the festival on Sunday.  I found this recipe on La Fuji Mama's blog and it was pretty darn easy and super tasty.  It definitely wasn't exactly the same as real French French bread.  The texture was a bit denser - this seems to be the problem with all my breads - I want fluffy bread!  Does anyone know how to fix this?  But still you can't beat fresh from the oven bread, even if its not entirely fluffy.

I cut the ingredients down from the original recipe so I only made one loaf - which disappeared quickly between three people.  Here's the recipe for one delightful loaf of bread...

Ingredients

• 1 packet (7 grams or 3/4 tbsp) dry active yeast
• 1/4 cup warm water
• 1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar
• 1 cup hot water
• 1.5 tbsp granulated sugar
• 1/2 tbsp salt
• 1/4 cup oil
• 3 cups all purpose flour

In a small bowl dissolve yeast with 1/4 cup warm water and 1/4 teaspoon granulated sugar.  In a large bowl, mix 1 cup of hot water with 1.5 tbsp sugar, 1/2 tbsp salt, and 1/4 cup oil.  Add 1.5 cups of flour to this and mix well. Then add your yeast mixture to this.  Add another 1.5 cups of flour and mix again.  Let the dough sit like this for one hour.

It'll seem like a gooey sticky mess - but thats OK.  After an hour take the dough out and on a heavily floured surface roll it into a rectangular shape.

Then roll your dough into a log, folding it under at the ends to form the iconic French bread shape.  Spray some PAM on a baking sheet and put your dough on it and let it rise again for a half hour or so.  Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F or 200 degrees C.  After your bread has risen slice the top of it diagonally 3 or 4 times and then pop it in the oven for 25-30 minutes (this is the time according to the recipe - ours needed about 35 minutes).

And you will get something that looks like this...

Which you can serve with something that looks like this....

And there you have it.  French bread and cheese - an unbeatable combination!