You can make a great crusty loaf of homemade French bread right in your kitchen. I adapted Julia Child’s classic recipe for modern kitchens to make an easy bread recipe perfect for bakers of all levels.
As a lifelong fan of Julia Child, I’ve been making her fabulous French recipes for years. And her Homemade French Bread is one of my all-time favorites. I’m thrilled to share my adaptation of Julia’s recipe with you!
In 1970. It became an instant classic, and like so many of Julia’s recipes, proved that the average home cook could make beautiful loaves of French Bread in her own kitchen.
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Update: I first wrote this post to celebrate Julia’s 100th birthday. Well, that was back in 2012, so to celebrate her 108th birthday, I’ve updated it with more helpful hints and troubleshooting tips so you can make homemade loaves that would make Julia proud.
If you’re a little uncertain of making French bread at home, there’s a great video of Julia making French bread. She shows you step by step how the dough should look and how you shape the dough to make a beautiful loaf.
If you want to have French bread for dinner, you need to start this recipe first thing in the morning. The recipe requires two long rises to develop a flavorful dough.
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I simplified Julia’s original recipe to use a stand mixer. I rarely knead dough by hand because the mixer makes it so easy, but if you don’t have a mixer, you can mix the dough by hand.
The dough itself is a simple combination of flour, water, salt and yeast. Start by mixing the dry ingredients together for just a few seconds in the stand mixer. Then, slowly stream in the water with the mixer running.
Once a shaggy dough forms, switch to the dough hook attachment. The hook does a better job of kneading the dough than the paddle. Let the machine knead the dough for about 5 minutes on medium speed.
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Remove the dough from the mixing bowl, grease the bowl with cooking spray, return the dough to the bowl, cover and let rise for 3 hours. The dough should increase by 3 ½ times.
Then gently remove the dough from the bowl and fold it over a couple of times to redistribute the gases. It should be light and pillowy soft.
Start by weighing your dough and dividing the total weight by the number of loaves you want to make. This French Bread recipe will make three small loaves. Or, if you don’t mind loaves that are the exact same size, just use a bench scraper to divide the dough into three pieces..
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Make a well down the middle and stretch the sides together. Then use two hands to gently roll the dough back and forward to elongate the bread. (If you have questions about shaping the loaves, Julie shows you how in this video.)
Cover them with plastic wrap or a dish towel and let the loaves rise for the final time. They should nearly triple in volume over the course of 1½ to 2½ hours.
While your loaves are rising, heat your baking stone in a hot oven at 450°F. Place a roasting pan on a rack beneath the baking stone or rack where you’ll bake your loaves.
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Before baking, score your loaves. You can use a lame, which is a fancy term for the blade that bread bakers use to score bread. A sharp knife or a straight razor will also work.
Quickly spritz the dough with water before transfering the shaped loaves to a baking stone with a peel. Alternative, if you’re not using a baking stone, simply slide the baking sheet with the shaped loves directly into the oven.
Transferring the dough to the pizza peel can be a delicate operation, so you can also rise your bread on parchment paper and put it on the pizza stone in the oven on the parchment paper. If you bake your bread on parchment paper, remember to remove the paper 10-15 minutes into baking.
Julia Child's French Bread With A Plate Of Daring Bakers!
Pour 1 cup of water into the roasting pan in the oven and quickly close the door to prevent much steam from escaping.
And here’s the hardest part: try to let the bread cool for a couple of hours before cutting it, if you can. If you cut the bread before it’s cool the inside of the bread can be a little gummy instead of light and airy.
Whether you knead the dough in your stand mixer or by hand, there are a few tell-tale signs that your dough is done keading and ready to rise. First, the dough will be smooth and slightly sticky to the touch. It should have a lot of spring to it, which you can test by poking the dough with your index finger. The dough should pop back easily.
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You can also do a windowpane test to ensure your dough is ready. Pick up the dough and grab hold of two sides. Slowly pull the dough apart. The dough should not tear easily as you pull, but rather should form a “windowpane” in the center of opaque dough that you can nearly see through, but doesn’t rip apart.
If your dough is not rising as you’d expect, the weather might be playing a role. Cold temperatures make dough rise more slowly, so try moving the dough to a warm place in your house. Often, just sticking it inside an oven that’s off is warmer than on your kitchen counter.
Using the pizza stone and a tray of water underneath helps to simulate a bakers oven and will give you a beautiful crisp crust.
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The addition of moisture in the oven helps develop a golden crisp crust. If you skipped spraying the loaf before or during the oven, or you didn’t add water to a pan, you won’t get the crust you’re looking for. As the water evaporates in the oven, it crisps up the outer layer of dough.
If you don’t have a pizza stone, you can still get gorgeous looking loaves, like the loaves pictures above, by baking your loaves on parchment paper on a baking sheet.
As long as you are using yeast that’s not expired, there’s no need to activate the yeast, mix it with warm water, before adding it to the flour.
Perfect Crusty French Bread And A Tribute To Julia Child
You don’t need much special equipment to make a perfect loaf of homemade French Bread, though there are a few items I find especially useful. For example, I like to use my stand mixer to knead the dough, but you could certainly do it by hand. Of course, that’s how Julia did it.
Julia calls for rising the loaves on linen, but you can use parchment paper. Plus, the parchment makes the loaves easy to move onto the baking stone.
A peel is an excellent tool to transfer your loaves to the oven. If you don’t have one, it’s best to do the final rise of the shaped loaves on the baking sheet you’ll use to bake them. That way, the entire pan goes straight into the oven to bake.
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The number one tool I’d recommend for perfect French bread is a pizza stone. You can certainly make homemade bread without one (just use a baking sheet), but a hot stone helps ensure that the crust gets delightfully crisp and golden. It’s fantastic for other recipes too, especially pizza!
If you caught the bug and can’t wait for your next loaf of home baked bread, join the club! Here’s what I’m baking up as soon as possible:
Thanks Julia for sharing your passion for cooking, your reminders to never apologize if something you bake is less than perfect, and to be fearless in the kitchen and in life.
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Here’s a video of Julia making French Bread, including shaping baguettes. Note: *more flour will be required for dusting and shaping the dough, and you may need more or less flour when mixing the dough as described in step 2.
Serving: 1 g | Calories: 134 kcal | Carbohydrates: 28 g | Protein: 4 g | Sodium: 399 mg | Fiber: 1 g
As of June 2022 Melissa Griffiths now is the one adding recipes. So think of it as Barbara Bakes, and Melissa too! Melissa and Barbara have been blogging friends for over 10 years and when Barbara was ready to retire and spend more time with her family, Melissa took over the site. Read more...Julia Child would have been 100 years old today. “Hooray!” I am delighted to join the Bread Baking Babes and Buddies in celebrating the life and accomplishment of this remarkable woman — a true Babe — with Julia’s
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Oh, Julia, thank you, thank you, thank you for this! Thank you for your dedication and your passion, your curiosity and your ingenuity, without which you would not have brought French bread into the purview of the home baker for the first time.
, Julia wrote that it was “one of the most difficult, elaborate, frustrating, and satisfying challenges I have ever undertaken.” After she and her husband Paul baked loaf upon trial loaf with less-than-successful results (“they tasted all right,
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