In my search for real Pain de Campagne, I made various recipes for Poilane style bread a few times. They are good. (Fresh bread is good by its nature). However, my experience is that it is possible to make a better bread of that style than the recipes floating around the net produce:
This is a 2 kilo+ loaf, because big loaves tend to have better flavor. It has the flavor of good "artisanal bread" without having "baker's couches" (big holes that some are so proud of). It works well for sandwiches, and does not drip mustard or melted cheese. It is sourdough, without baker's yeast, however, it is the least sour of all the breads I have made from my home ground flours. And, there is no "white" flour in it. Sieves made of horsehair could have produced this grist of flour 2,000 years ago. Except the high protein hard red wheat was not widely available prior to 1840.
It is darker than most of the loafs I produce because of the malted barley, long fermentation time, and it is a big loaf, so it gets toasted as it bakes.
I make a mix of grain including ~66% hard red wheat, ~30% spelt, ~2% rye and ~2% sprouted and dried barley. I stone grind the mix finely, then sift through a #40 sieve. I call this “Pmix”. This mix of grain allows faster fermentation that any other grain mix I have tried, and much faster fermentation than white flour I have used. (It may be that the bran in whole wheat versions of this flour slow/ reduce the change in volume that I use as a proxy for rate of fermentation.)
My sourdough starter (Joe) lives on the above Pmix. After baking, I mix enough Pmix into Joe to make about 50 grams of very stiff dough, then every day, another 30 grams of flour and 30 g of water is mixed in with Joe kept at 38F. The day before the next bake, enough Pmix and water is added to bring Joe up to about 350 grams, and it is left on the counter to become levain. I do not discard, I might make waffles or crackers, but I do not discard.
I take ~300g of levain, let it get very active, then I add ~600 ml water and 1,000 grams of the Pmix, and mix into a slightly stiff dough. I let it ferment for a few hours, then add 26 gm salt and ~ 80 ml of water. I knead with wet hands to make a supple dough, and retard overnight. In the morning, I gently shape, and let the loaf proof in a cloth lined basket at cool room temperature for several hours.
I bake on a stone in the middle of my oven preheated to 390F. I turn the oven’s broiler on at low power a few minutes before I put the loaf in the oven and turn the oven from broiler to convection at 390F about 5 minutes after putting the loaf in the oven. Over the approximate 1 hour of baking time, I turn off the convection and gradually reduce the oven temperature to 350F.
I do not mess with adding water to make steam. There is more than 700 ml of water in the dough. When the dough hits the hot stone, it makes lots of steam. More water would just cool the oven.
This is a sourdough that stays very nice for a few days. It is easier to make one good batch of sourdough per week than to make 4 batches of baguettes will be stale in 12 hours.
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