OK, it might have helped if I put in something to give you a sense of scale - the 'bun' is about 18 inches across.
I bought a new book on bread baking from some freak, so I'm still searching for the perfect french bread recipe. These recipes are using a pate fermentee to make the first fermentation go easier, but I still haven't gotten the crust right and the dough itself is a unstructured blob of dough to shape.
We'll see.