The Phantom French Bread
“Man, this sucks.”
I aggressively scooped up the snow with a square-shaped shovel, throwing it onto the side of the road and out of the way.
I was in the middle of some light snow shoveling.
It doesn’t pile up here in Legol as much as Japan’s snowier regions, so honestly I don’t really need to be this meticulous. But I wanted to at least clear the area around the inn where I’m staying.
The inn is short-staffed, so this probably looks pretty rough on them. Though I guess you could just say I’m trying to earn some goodwill.
“Ah, thank you as always, Mongrel. That’s more than enough!”
“No, no, please don’t worry about it. I’m a Guildsman, so I’ve got strength to spare. Shall we call it here for now? It’ll be endless if we wait for it to stop.”
The innkeeper woman who runs the inn I’m staying at has been handling almost all the work herself ever since her husband passed away from illness six years ago.
She has a 15-year-old daughter, a son around 10 years old, and a 6-year-old boy who bawled his eyes out the other day when she boiled some crabs. The older daughter is pretty diligent about helping her mother, but it seems like most of her time is spent looking after her younger siblings.
Apparently, the range of work she can handle has narrowed since her husband passed away.
With her jack-of-all-trades husband gone, some of the inn’s original recipes have been lost and she struggles with the physical labor, so the level of service has dropped.
That’s why the inn had developed a bit of a poor reputation. But that quiet atmosphere actually worked in my favor when I was looking for a place to stay in Legol.
I’ve been renting the same room here for 6 years now…before coming here, I did a lot of inn-hopping too since I couldn’t stay anywhere long-term. It was really tough.
I wanted a long-term inn to settle into, and the innkeeper desperately needed guests even if she couldn’t provide much service. Our mutual interests aligned, leading to our current arrangement.
…Come to think of it, I’ve been in Legol for quite a while now.
Six years at this “Skol Inn”, plus around two years of bouncing between other inns in Legol before that…damn, has it really been 8 years since I came to Legol? Wild.
I had kind of forgotten, but I decided to make this my base when I was 21…which means I’m 29 now. Yikes, soon my stomach might start rejecting greasy foods. I’ll turn into some monster who only likes lean meats and fish dishes…
“You should find yourself a good woman soon too, Mongrel. You’re still pretty youthful for your age.”
“Hahaha…”
Aunties are strict about bachelors no matter what world you’re in.
“What about my Julia? Sure, she can be a bit loud but…”
“Mom! Stop saying stuff like that!”
Just as the innkeeper was trying to kick her aggressive matchmaking into high gear, Julia’s voice rang out from inside the inn.
Yeah, more often than not these kinds of talks are an unwelcome nuisance for the people actually involved.
By the way, Julia’s reaction here isn’t some tsundere thing or anything like that.
She’s been getting pretty friendly with a boy around her age lately, so she’s just mad because she finds it annoying.
Older guys really shouldn’t misunderstand situations like this, especially when it comes to younger girls.
“Well, I’ll head back to my room then…”
“Oh right, Mongrel here, take this! Now where did I put it…let’s see…”
The innkeeper went scampering into the inn’s kitchen.
I could hear her and her daughter bickering loudly about something. Their relationship isn’t a bad one, they’re just noisy. Pretty much par for the course.
After a while, the innkeeper came back out holding a ceramic pot.
“Here you go, I mentioned it before right? White wheat flour! My relatives sent me this special stuff but we don’t really make bread or anything here so I was just letting it go to waste.”
“For real??”
White wheat flour huh. That’s just downright exciting news.
If it had been some random vegetable pickled in salt I would’ve put on my best poker face and thanked her for it.
“There’s just a little, but please use it! You’re always tinkering with crazy inventions and stuff right, Mongrel? Feel free to use it for that!”
“Ahaha…thank you so much.”
“Just make sure it’s not one of those rock-hard things like last time, okay? I want something tasty this time around!”
The innkeeper gave me a couple hearty pats on the back before heading back inside.
…Well, whatever.
In any case, I got my hands on some pristine white wheat flour.
“So…the time has finally come, has it?”
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Back in my room at the inn, I lined up my ingredients and folded my arms.
Bread is a major food item in this country too.
But the bread in this world doesn’t use pure white wheat flour. It has a distinct weird smell, it’s hard and dry, it makes your throat parched…from a modern perspective, there are quite a few issues with it.
Well, I don’t really mind personally. Even if the taste isn’t great, the nutritional value is good. It has more healthy components than the pure white stuff. If you just think of it as a health food, it’s…fine.
But pretending not to notice that mental gymnastics is getting exhausting, so today I’ve decided to make my own bread.
What I’ll be making is a French loaf.
It’s a super simple bread made from just wheat flour, water, salt and yeast. (Not that simple actually.)
The best part is not having to use expensive ingredients like eggs or sugar that are hard to come by in this world. That’s a huge plus.
Since I’ll be baking it by a fireplace, it’ll be difficult to get that classic long, thin baguette shape. So this time I’m going to aim for a batard that’s 40-50cm long instead.
While the ingredients for this French loaf are simple, the manufacturing process has quite a few waiting periods involved.
Things like really working the flour into the water, letting it rise and ferment – it’s all pretty time-consuming. But putting in that effort results in some seriously delicious French bread. It’s pretty much just a hobby bread though. Not really meant for commercial production.
This time of year is perfect for getting into ambitious cooking projects like this. I can let the dough rise by the fireplace indoors, and use snow for refrigeration when storing it. My spirit of culinary adventure can really shine.
But there are still some tricky hurdles when it comes to breadmaking in this other world.
Sealing and covering the dough is one issue. When letting dough rise, you’d normally put it in a bowl and cover it with plastic wrap. Obviously this world doesn’t have plastic wrap. You could cover it with cloth or a board weighed down, but I’ve got a smarter solution in mind.
“Fufufu…with this beeswax wrap, it’ll be perfect…”
Beeswax wrap. Simply put, it’s a piece of cloth that has been soaked in beeswax harvested from honeycomb.
Normally it’s stiff, but the beeswax softens up from hand warmth, allowing the cloth to become pliable.
So if you lay this softened beeswax wrap over a bowl and fold the edges down along the sides, voila! It creates an airtight seal around the container.
It’s good enough to market as one of Lord Chaos’ inventions, but beekeepers still aren’t producing enough honey for beeswax prices to drop. So for now it remains an unreleased product idea.
Beeswax has so many great uses, I wish it would become more plentiful…the rich always just want to turn it into candles. Go to bed early instead of burning the midnight oil all the time, you jerks.
“And now, it’s finally your turn.”
But beeswax wrap has another crucial job to do.
That would be covering and sealing this ceramic container here.
This is absolutely essential for making one of the key ingredients for leavening bread – yeast.
Of course, this world doesn’t have any dried active yeast. The normal way is to make a natural yeast starter from scratch using fruits, sugar, and wheat.
And since no one is really selling their natural yeast starter cultures, you can’t just buy it anywhere. You gotta make it yourself.
Man, it’s such a pain having to regularly add more wheat and swish it around to feed it. The beeswax wrap really helped streamline that process though. Since the container isn’t transparent glass, I have to keep uncovering it and checking how it’s doing. The wrap makes that way easier.
Mmm, all the prep work is pretty much covered then.
Now I just need to patiently see the breadmaking through.
…A French loaf with some butter on top would be amazing. Or maybe tear off chunks and dip it in ajillo sauce.
The possibilities are endless…
“Alright, let’s check on how that natural yeast starter is doing…”
Eagerly, I peeled back the beeswax wrap covering the yeast starter container.
“…Oh no.”
Inside was a disgusting, mold-infested mess that had once been my natural yeast culture.
Total yeast starter failure.
“…Okay then, French bread is cancelled! We’re making focaccia instead, let’s pivot!”
That day, I ended up making the unleavened focaccia bread that I’m not even particularly fond of. I ate the crumbly result and fell asleep unsatisfied.
The next day when I shared some with the innkeeper, all I got was “Hmm, well it’s not bad I suppose.”
I can’t say I disagree. I don’t dislike focaccia, but…
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