Homemade Italian French Bread

Savanna and I learned to bake our own bread from our friends at church. It is SO much better than store bought, and it's way cheaper too. Takes a little bit of time, but not much effort. And for the record this is not my healthiest recipe, but I did modify it a bit to make it more so. I do like that there is only 6 ingredients, all of which I can pronounce and know what they are! I am going to post the original recipe and I'll put my changes in parenthesis.

Ingredients:

(makes two large french loaves)

• 2 1/2 cups of water
• 2 Tb of yeast
• 5 Tb melted Crisco (I substitute olive oil)
• 3 Tb sugar
• 2 tsp sea salt
• 6 cups of flour (we did 3 cups of whole wheat & 3 cups of white flour- any more whole wheat than that and it becomes very heavy)

Mix 3 cups of flour, the Crisco, 2 cups of the water, sugar and salt.

Dissolve the yeast in the remaining 1/2 cup of water and add to the flour mixture.

Beat in the 3 remaining cups of flour very gradually. The dough should be sticky to the touch, but should not remain on the skin and should pull away from the sides of the mixing bowl.

Let rest (covered with a damp rag) for 10 mins. Punch Down. Let rise 15 mins (still covered with a damp rag). Punch down. Repeat 4 times.

Divide dough into 2 parts. Roll the dough flat into a rectangular shape. Roll up into a long loaf, pinching the edges as tight as you can.

Place both loaves on a greased cookie sheet and let rise 40 mins (cover again with the rag). We decided to put one long loaf and one smaller loaf on a cookie sheet, and one loaf in a regular loaf pan. It's the same amount of bread- just different shapes.

Bake at 375 degrees for 25 minutes.

The results were great!