French baking - bâtard and boule with garlic

Now it's time again for baking bread. Getting out of bed in the morning becomes increasingly difficult depending on the time you go to bed. Consequently I started a bit later than usual. Apart from that I wanted to use the time before starting with the baking for a bit garden preparation, like getting some plants on the way for putting in the garden in a few weeks. I got some pumpkin seeds and some beans. Since last year the "giant" pumpkin was only a tiny thing I got myself something different this year: eatable decorative gourds. So I can decide later whether they make up for eating or just for decoration. However, that will not until September or October.

Anyway, back to the bread. Today the bread on the list was with garlic. Most of the ingredients and procedure remains the same, although I nearly ran out of strong baking flour, so I could only use 200 g instead of the 225 g - just took a bit more spelt flour. I need to stock up again on flour. The garlic is also running out quickly. If you like bruschetta, it's no wonder.

I had to reduce the luke warm water to 250 ml. If I had known that the dough still feels so wet I would have gone done further.

For this bread you need 6 cloves of garlic, which you cut in small cubes or kind of shape. You steam it briefly and roll it afterwards through some flour. After that you can add it to the dough when it has taken form after the first kneading.

How to proceed, you have to read in my older entries in connection with French bread.

To cover the dough while rising you can use a wet kitchen cloth or cling film. This time I went for cling film.

In this picture you can barely see the cling film. Whatsoever I can say right away that using cling film is not so good, because it, well, clings to much. Maybe there is a trick, but I didn't think about it. Therefore scraping the dough from the foil was on the program.

Here now the end result of the bread, although I must admit that it doesn't look much different on the picture when you compare it with the other pictures of the bread I put on earlier: 

Sure is, that the bread tastes nice again. So far I haven't been disappointed with the recipes from "Confessions of a French baker". If you are a garlic lover, you cannot go wrong with this bread.