Peasant Bread, or A Slacker's Attempt at French Bread

This is my second attempt to make "French" bread in the oven, and while not overwhelming it's pretty passable and especially easy. Bonus points for having very few (simple) ingredients, and for being vegan.

I love my bread machine for the fact that it will knead/rise dough for me while I do more important things like Facebook and feeding my cats catnip. If you don't have a bread machine, there are inevitably reviews giving you instruction for doing it all by hand.

I used the Peasant Bread recipe over at AllRecipes then modified:

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 tablespoon white sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 3 1/2 cups bread flour
• 2 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

Directions

1. Place ingredients in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select dough cycle. 
2. When dough cycle is close to completion, start the oven on 350 preheat. When dough cycle is complete, throw onto a floured surface to mold into a reasonable "peasant bread"-shaped ball. Slice the top a couple of times with a sharp knife. (Honestly I don't know why, but there has to be a reason you always see that.)
3. Bake at 350 on a *pizza stone* (or bread stone) that's been lightly dusted with cornmeal. Apparently, the baking stone makes a huge difference.
4. At the same time, you want a pan of hot water below the stone to generate steam in the baking process. I put one of my Le Creuset pieces in there and poured boiling water from my kettle into it. 
5. Bake for approximately 40 minutes, but eyeball it until the crust looks about right (golden brown).
   
   I've been reading that they key to French Bread is a steam injection oven, which I obviously don't have and am assuming you don't either. So, that pan of water makes a difference. I've made the peasant bread recipe before in the bread machine and this turned out totally differently, and I'd say better. Maybe I'm partial to round bread.
   
   Another option is to fill a fine mister/spray bottle with water and spray it every 15 minutes. I don't have an open spray bottle at the moment, but maybe I'll try that next time.