Easy Homemade French Bread Recipe | You Also Love

 Today I'm showing you how to make perfect homemade French Bread. Making your own French Bread at home is not only ridiculously cheap, but it's also fairly simple. Your water should be just warm to the touch like a baby's bathwater. You want to keep it between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Then we're gonna add in 1 1/2 tablespoons of instant dry yeast, I use instant because it doesn't require any proofing, along with 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, and then 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. We're gonna add somewhere between 4 1/2 and maybe 5 cups of flour in this recipe total. So we're going to start on the low end to play it safe. The actual amount of flour that you add during bread-making changes depending on a variety of factors, like the weather, so we'll start on the low side and get this mixing. Now we'll watch it as it starts to mix and see if we need to add any more flour. 

✅ French Bread Recipe Ingredients

• 1½ tablespoons instant dry yeast

• 2 cups warm water

• 1½ teaspoons salt

• 4½ - 5 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 large egg, beaten

You'll want to wait until the majority of the flour is mixed in before making the call on whether or not to add in more. Now I can see that the dough is having trouble sticking to the sides of the bowl, so that means it needs just a little bit more flour, so I'm going to add in about another 1/4 cup. Keep on adding flour a little bit at a time until your dough is able to pull away from the sides of the bowl and leave it clean. Next, we're gonna transfer this to a lightly greased mixing bowl. I'm going to turn the dough over a couple of times so it gets a little bit of grease on it, then cover it with a towel and let it rise until it's double in size which will take about an hour, give or take a little bit depending on how warm your house is. 

Once your dough has risen, turn it out onto a clean surface and divide the dough in half, and then we're gonna roll each half into a large rectangle. I make mine about 18 inches long and 11 inches wide. Then we're gonna roll it up as tightly as we can from the long end. We want it to be nice and tight. Roll it all the way and then I'm gonna take it and roll it so that the ends get tapered off. This is the technical part of French bread making and you can see it's actually quite simple. Next, you'll want to place your loaves onto your baking tray. You can use just a regular baking tray or you can use a French bread pan that looks just like this.

 It has a whole bunch of holes in it for even cooking so that the heat can get all the way around the loaf. Whatever pan you're using you want it to be lightly greased and you want to place the loaf seam side down. If you plan on making French bread fairly often at home, I highly recommend buying the French bread loaf pan. I'll give a link in the video description. It's actually really cheap, and it does make a huge difference in giving you that bakery-quality loaf right at home. Next, we're gonna let these rise for about 40 minutes. After it's risen the second time, take a sharp knife and score the top of the loaves with little diagonal cuts that are about a quarter of an inch deep. Then take a beaten egg and brush it over the top of the loaves to give it some shine. Then we're gonna bake these in a 375-degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes. Your bread is done when it's a nice golden brown on top. Now just like other baked goods, it's best within the first 24 hours.