I fail at loaf shaping. I made french bread (from Mastering the Art of French Cooking) over the weekend. It’s a bread with a high water content. I ended up kneading it with a bench scraper because it was so sticky. I just… I don’t have the skills (yet) to make loaves. I make amoebas that taste like bread. Good bread, though. The smell might have been a little too yeasty, but I really liked the flavor of the bread. I’m annoyed by the loaf problem and intend to work on it.

In other bread news, I made a decent zucchini bread. I used the recipe in the latest issue of Cook’s Country, from the people who brought you Cook’s Illustrated, but instead of just putting out twelve issues of that a year, they want you to buy two subscriptions. Gr. Anyway, although I didn’t whisk together the dry ingredients before mixing them into the wet, I still think it turned out okay. There may be places where the cinnamon and allspice concentration is a bit higher than others. I’ll whisk the dry ingredients next time. I didn’t really have enough space. It’s quite a bit harder to work in my new kitchen. Very little counter space.

The recipe for the zucchini bread will go up sometime in the next week. As for the french bread, that’ll go up when I’m satisfied with all aspects of it.