agres's blog

I have not exhausted the concept of Pain de Campagne. In fact, it is becoming clear that I have not even started to explore the topic. The more I bake big loaves, the better I like them. This is slightly acid, balanced with some sweetness with a nice caramel note and wheat undertones.

This is a 3.3 lb. loaf that is mostly whole wheat with some sprouted rye and sprouted spelt (~5%??)

It was mixed in the 5 qt.  stand mixer that I bought in 1980.

I learned to cook by going out to the garden and picking vegetables, and then going down to the hen house and seeing who had stopped laying, was ready to be dinner.  That taught me an improvisational style of cooking - cooking as a form of jazz - the garden produces similar products over a period of weeks, and one cooks variations on a theme, because every day the basket from the garden varies, but there are themes that carry over from day to day and from week to week.  That calls for improv bread. Certainly there is always pita, but . . . . 

Some people paint sunflowers, I bake bread- until get good at it.  I decided that in order to really understand Pain de Campagne, I had to bake them actual size. 

This loaf is built from a hundred grams of starter, 600 grams water, 1,000 g bread flour, and 20 g salt.

I bought white bread flour for the Thanksgiving party and it is time to use it up.

This is about a 2-pound sourdough loaf baked from Graincraft’s Morbread. It is a flour that I like for white bread.

I measured out 400 gr water, 600 grams of flour, and 12 gram of salt.

A couple of ounces of my starter was mixed with a similar volume of the water, and enough flour mixed in to make a very soft dough, which was left to sit (covered) on the counter for a few hours until it had more than doubled in volume and looked foamy.  

Big bread – about 30% whole wheat with bread flour.

All sourdough, refreshed twice, then mixed dough using a total of ~ 1 liter of water, total weight of dough was just over 2 kilo.  Baked on preheated stone at 400F with convection.

I have romantic notions about pain de compagnon feeding agricultural crews. My grandfather was a farmer, and his dinner table routinely fed a dozen workers. There were usually about 4 - loaves of bread on the table, each weighing a pound. As a young man, I worked wheat harvest crews, but by then we used “combines “and there was less physical labor, but my mother insisted that I show my wife how to scythe, shock, flail, and winnow rye. That is real work, that brings one to the dinner table hungry. I always liked the idea of one, big, hearty loaf that would feed a dozen hungry workers.

This is the best 100% whole wheat bread that does not have any milk or fat added that my wife and I have ever eaten.

Yesterday, we finished off Monday’s bake with lunch, so I wanted to bake today.

I have been looking at bread and pastry recipes since the days when Louis Diat was still chef at the Ritz -  call it 60+ years. I see progressively more detailed and pedantic recipes.  I think some of that is an effort to sell the newest edition of the latest cookbook.

For a very long time, I have been fascinated by “pain de campagne”. In the cookbooks, it is made with mostly white bread flour, to which some (20%) whole wheat flour is added. Sometimes it is made with yeast, and sometimes sourdough and sometimes something in between. I have tried a bunch of these recipes and variations on them.  Then, there are stories and rumors about great breads made of fresh ground high extraction flours (e.g., https://breadtopia.com/whole-grain-sourdough/ ).

I like easy bread. I bake because I am too lazy to go down to a bakery and buy bread. There have been times when I could put the tea kettle on, and step out the door, and be back with an excellent baguette before the kettle boiled.  If I could still do that, I would bake less often.