pain de campagne - revisited

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/ ).

The color and texture of “pain de campagne” and Poilâne style miches can be similar, but they really are not the same bread!  The Poilâne style dough is what I want for my pain de campagne. I make it in a bunch of different shapes.

I use a mix of 5% rye, 10% spelt, and 85% hard red winter wheat. I keep that on hand and grind the day I make the dough. Then I sift through a #40 screen which gives about an 80% extraction. (The bran goes in our porridge mix.)

I put the flour on the bench, make a well, put  a piece of starter the size of a walnut in the well, add water, mix the starter into the water, and gradually incorporate the rest of the flour as I add water and mix with my fingers. I pull all the dough together with the bench knife and knead. The moisture content of my grain varies, thus the amount of water to make a good dough varies, and it is easier to gauge the hydration of the dough, when I am mixing by hand.  As the last step in kneading, I add the salt.

It goes into a covered proofing tub, and it sits on the kitchen counter all night.  It is winter, and the house is cool. First thing in the morning, it gets shaped, and goes into a proofing basket.  Yesterday, total process from starting to grind the grain to bread on the cooling rack was ~20 hours. The kitchen was cool, mostly below 67F and closer to 60F at 5 a. m.  I used a heaping teaspoon of very active starter for ~500g of flour. I am not sure why my dough rises faster.