The Fresh Loaf

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agres

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.

300 grams of sourdough active starter in the kettle, with a good splash of water, mixed into a batter, and left covered for 2 hours.  Another splash of water, more flour, mixing and fermenting. The rest of the 700 ml of water, the rest of the kilo of flour, 20 grams of salt, mixed to a shaggy dough, let sit a couple of hours, then mixed to a smooth dough, and allowed to ferment at 65F for 6 hours.  Round up, bench rest, shape, and into a cloth lined colander set in the frig. overnight. It sat on the counter while the bake stone heated.  The loaf was glazed with egg white and water. A piece of parchment made transfer from the peel to the 400F bake stone easy. The bread went in 10 minutes after oven temp was 400F, so the stone was not fully heated. The last 15 minutes of baking were at 375F convection.  The loaf was cut after about half an hour on the cooling rack. The bread board is 7.5” wide.

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agres

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 . . . . 

Many of the recipes for pain de compagnon take days to produce - more of requiem than jazz.  However, if you have a very good sourdough starter, you can make a very good pain de compagnon that  can be served for supper. (If you start first thing in the morning.)  That is, sourdough starter to baked loaf in 10 hours, and that is a loaf that can be served after only an hour of cooling.

My approach:

starting first thing in the morning ; I weigh 12 grams of salt, 400 grams of bread flour, and 200 grams of whole wheat or high extraction flour into a container. I measure out 400 ml of water into a (canning jar.)(Canning jars have volume marks that are close enough for this kind of bread.

I put 100 grams of starter in the kettle of my stand mixer, add 1/4 of the water in the canning  jar, and enough of the whole wheat flour on the top of the flour container to make a batter. I split a plastic bag to cover the kettle with the dough hook in place, and let the "first refreshment" rise till bubbly - a couple of hours.

I add a third of the water remaining in the jar to the kettle, and enough flour to again make a batter, cover and let ferment on the counter. At this time, I put a teaspoon of yeast and a teaspoon of flour in the jar, and let rise on the counter.

After lunch, I add the water/yeast in  the jar to the kettle, and stir in the flour/salt from the flour container into the kettle by hand-fulls to make a shaggy dough. I let the flour hydrate for half an hour, and use the dough hook to knead the dough, adjusting the water/flour to make a dough the consistency of baguette dough. 

I take the dough hook out and let rise at 85F (proof setting in my oven) for an hour. 

About 2 pm I turn the dough out on the bench, round up, bench rest, shape the loaf, and set to rise in a floured, fabric lined colander at 85F

About 3:30 pm I take the dough out of the oven, and preheat the baking stone to 375F.

About 4 pm I put a piece of parchment paper on the peel, turn the risen dough onto the parchment paper, lash the loaf, and slide it into bakestone in the 375F convection oven. It will need about 45 minutes to bake.

After an hour on a cooling rack, it will have set enough to be served at a 6 pm supper.

This approach uses a few hacks. First, the sourdough rises faster in a whole wheat batter.  The sourdough bacteria started at room temperature dominate the dough to provide a mild flavor, sourdough texture, and reasonable keeping qualities. The yeast have time to multiply, and form a poolish flavor. The yeast and bread flour combine to provide a moderate density crumb with good volume - this big bread.   I think big loaves have better texture and flavor. And the yeast/bread flour allows the loaf to set quickly as it cools. These loaves will make huge Reuben sandwiches that do not leak melted cheese or Russian dressing.  Many bakery loaves of this size - leak.

I stone grind my own whole wheat and high-extraction flour. The grain mix usually contains ~5% rye and often at bit of spelt or kamut or both.  My fresh ground flour seems to allow faster sourdough fermentation than any of the commercial flours I have tried.  On the other hand, the bread flour I use is optimized for yeast, and allows faster yeast fermentation than my normal stone ground flour.  If I wanted faster yeast fermentation in whole wheat, I would sprout, dry, and grind some of my grain berry mix. The commercial white bread flour gives much better volume than my stone ground whole grain flours.  When I am serving herring with cream sauce, the bread is 100% whole grain, and dense enough not to leak, with enough flavor to stand up to the herring. 

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agres

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.

The starter was put in a big bowl, and a like volume of water mixed in, then enough flour to make a very soft dough. The refreshment was left covered to rise on the counter in a cool kitchen for a few hours.  More water was mixed in, and flour added to make a very soft dough, and left covered on the counter for a few hours.  The rest of the water was added, along with the salt, and flour added by handfuls. It was a lot of dough, so stretched and folded every hour for a few hours instead of straight kneading. 

The dough was rounded up, bench rest, shaped, and allowed to rise in a salad spinner lined with a cloth. When the dough had proofed, it was turned out onto a piece of parchment paper on a peel, and gently slid into the oven. 

It was baked on a stone in a preheated oven  at 400F convection for 25 minutes, then 15 minutes at 375F convection, and a final 5 minutes at 325F convection. It is "golden brown" but looks paler because of the flour on it.  There is 600 grams of water in the dough-  that makes a lot of steam. My glasses fogged up from the steam coming out of the oven when I moved the loaf as I turned the oven down to 325F. One reason for moving the loaves when I turn the oven down is to release steam out of the oven for a crisp crust. With a good electric oven, there is no need to fuss with putting water in the oven -that extra water just cools the oven.

 

 

 

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agres

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.  

I added about 150 gr of water (leaving about 200 grams of water), and enough flour to make a very soft mix. The soft mix is easy to stir, so it can be easily stirred well. Then, it sat covered on the kitchen counter for a few hours.  Thus, most of the flour will be fully hydrated and have developed gluten, before the final dough mix.

I tossed in the salt, the rest of the water, and mixed. Then, I gradually mixed in the rest of the flour to form a dough about the consistency of baguette dough. This is an easy knead!  And, let it ferment for a couple of hours.  Later in the evening, I rounded it up, bench rest, shaped, and put it in a banneton and let it rise in the refrigerator overnight.

In the morning it finished rising on the counter, and after 1.5 hours, it went onto a bake stone an electric oven preheated to 400F. I put a piece of parchment paper on the peel and turned the proofed loaf onto the parchment paper. The parchment paper makes it easy to use a peel to lay the loaf in the baking stone. After 20 minutes the temp was dropped to 375F, the parchment paper retrieved,  and the loaf was baked to an internal temp of 208F. Total time from measuring the ingredients to finishing baking was ~ 18 hours, half on the counter in a cool room, half in the refrigerator, with 40 minutes in the oven. 

It has a nice crisp crust, a slightly chewy crumb that is barely dense enough not to leak sandwich fillings (when cut thick), and definite, but very mild, sourdough and bread flavors. It is well suited to a wide variety of menus. By any standard, it is an excellent bread.

Sorry guys, I like a golden-brown crust, (sometimes with the rustic flour coating that makes it look pale).  I like the ease of just using my peel to slip loaves in and out of the oven.  I like the ease of mixing flour into water. I think mixing water and flour into levain makes a better dough.

The really nice thing about the white flour is that its hydration is predictable, so one can use a precise baker’s percentage.

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agres

 

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.

 

 

 

 
  

 


 

 

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agres

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.

[Poilâne’s] signature item is a four-pound miche, a wheel of sourdough—also known as country bread, pain Poilâne, and pain au levain—made from Pierre’s original starter, stone-ground gray flour, water, and sea salt from the marshes of Guérande. ....(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/03/bread-winner) This hearkens back to my romantic notions of feeding a harvest crew, but it raises 2 questions;

1)    Why are all the recipes for “Poilâne style” bread for small (1.5 lb.) loaves?

2)    Why does Poilâne use bolted flour?

Real workers need strength, and the bran in wheat can be a MAJOR contributor to building real strength. Even if they are selling to rich ladies, who will never do a days labor in their lives, eating whole wheat bread as an adolescent will result in healthy bones that are less likely to break in old age.  Thus, Poilâne’s traditional bread is a compromise of the traditional hearty French breads that fed (and strengthened) workers
 and - a baguette. The purpose of the compromise is marketing. 

Recipes for “Poilâne style” bread aid in that marketing. Those recipes do not result in bread that is just like Poilâne’s, and thereby add to the mystic and market brand of Poilâne.

Today, I doubt if you can produce an exact duplicate of Poilâne’s loaves. However, I think that if you focus on producing the best bread possible, you will be able to produce the best bread for your menu. Poilâne does not produce bread for your menu – they produce bread for a mass market, and expect you, to adapt your menu to a mass marketed product.

A week ago, I would have said that the only path to Poilâne style loaf was high extraction flour with significant amounts of spelt. That was/is the conventional wisdom. Today, I would say that a similar bread can be produced from whole wheat and intelligent use of sourdough. Today, I assert that Poilâne’s use of high extraction flour and spelt is to facilitate high speed / low cost production (and for marketing.)

I am not against Poilâne; I am for people baking bread that is well suited for their menu. To this end, I assert that one of the glories of Poilâne’s loaves is their crust. A two-kilo miche has a crust that cannot be duplicated on smaller loaves. If you want that crust, you need to bake big bread.  A recipe that intends to produce a one-kilo loaf will not result in the texture and flavor typical of a larger loaf.

In 2012, we went to Europe, and I put a good deal of effort into visiting bakers and tasting bread. The 2-kilo miche that was on our lunch table today, was better than any bread that I had in Europe. It can be done with a household oven. And, I did not use a mixer for that miche, it was made by hand, and it was not noticeable more effort than making a kilo loaf.  It cost me a couple of dollars for wheat berries, a couple of cents for salt,  ~ 75 cents for electric power, and 40 minutes of my time including cleanup. The only downside is that we have a lot of bread sitting on the kitchen counter. Like any of Poilâne’s American customers, I am going to freeze some bread.

 

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agres

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.

About 2 pm, I put 3 or 4 oz of starter from the frig. into the stand mixer with 100 ml of water, and turned it on. I added ww flour (5% rye, 10% spelt, 10% Kamut, 75% hard red winter wheat, fresh ground) until I had a soft dough. I set the hook into the bottom of the kettle, put a lid on it, and left it until early evening. The kitchen was ~65 F. Then, I added 200 ml more water, turned the mixer on and added ww flour until I had a soft dough. I set the hook into the bottom of the kettle, put a lid on it, and left it until early morning. (Kitchen was ~ 60F) I added 300 ml water and 12 gr of salt, and turned the mixer on and slowly added ww flour, until I had a medium dough, let it sit for 30 minutes, and then mixed until it was well developed and smooth. I washed the hook, and let the dough rise in the kettle with a lid on it for about an hour. I turned the dough out on the floured bench, rounded it up and let it sit covered for ~30 minutes. I shaped the loaf, and let it rise in a lined basket for about 90 minutes, then baked it on a stone at 415 F convection for 15 minutes, brushed it with water, reduced the oven temp to 375F convection for another 15 minutes, then let it finish at 325F convection for 5 minutes.

It is upside-down because instead of working from flour measurements, it works from volumes of water. It is moist and tender because it gets a long fermentation (without salt, so the fermentation goes FAST!  And, the hydration is correct.  When working from baker’s percentages with fresh-ground grain mixes, it is difficult to get hydration correct. Only a “Troll” would advocate for skill with baker’s percentages, and then work backwards from water to flour. Only an “Old One” would get it correct.

This is the Old School Pain de Campagne that I have been seeking for 50 years.  This tells me that the traditional “Staff of Life” sometimes included better bread than modern people are ever likely to eat. At this point, I am confused and speechless.

 

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agres

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.

I seek the best bread for the least effort. I do not need the absolute consistency of a large bakery. I do not need the labor efficacy of a commercial bakery, and I do not have the equipment that is found in a bakery. I do not need a stream of novelties to prick the curiosity of a customer. Nevertheless, I do turnout very good breads and pastries, well suited to the menu of the day.

My rules are simple:

  1. Good ingredients. White flour goes stale in a few months. Whole grain flour goes stale/rancid very fast. Use good, fresh ingredients.
  2. Learn to use baker’s percentages so you can scale recipes up or down.  And, knowing the baker’s percentages for various kinds of dough and the appropriate techniques, means you do not need a recipe.
  3. Hydration is very important. Regardless of point 2. above flours/grain absorb and lose moisture, and advanced bakers will compensate for changes in the moisture of ingredients. In a commercial setting, the flour/grain is always fresh, and the moisture as it comes from the vender will be consistent. (And many professional bakers do not think about this issue, but the best bakers do quality control, and check the hydration of every batch of dough!) However, flour/grain that has been in storage in a home may have absorbed or lost moisture.  Spend some time baking with a good, experienced baker and learn what the various doughs should feel like.
  4. Time and temperature schedules are guidelines, but what really counts is the condition of the dough. Learn to check gluten development (window test) and stage of fermentation/ readiness for baking with your hands. When the dough is ready, guidelines do not matter, the dough is the boss.
  5. Have fun! (Where else do you get to “Punch the boss down”?) Treat each bake as a lesson.  Keep a journal – mine is mostly in the form of annotations in my various cookbooks and a binder of printouts, also annotated. (There was a time when it was 6,000-4” by 6” index cards.)
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agres

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.

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agres

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. 

We remodeled the kitchen six years ago, and the oven was selected so we could have good bread often, and easily. Our oven is an electric convection oven. It is a “home” model, so it does not have the very high temperatures, or high recovery rate, or high thermal inertia of a commercial baking oven. It does not have steam injection. Nevertheless, it serves to easily produce any bread (or pastry) that we want, with a minimum of fuss and effort. That includes excellent baguettes, pain de campagne, and other breads and pastries that I am proud to serve.

Our home oven has a “Stone” function for making “Artisan Breads”, however, that requires an expensive accessory baking stone and a long preheat. I do not use it. 

I do not use any kind of a baking cloche! They are not needed, and they interfere with the shape and form of my breads.

I do not add water or ice to the hot oven. Bread dough is about 70% water, and water takes a lot of energy to heat it into steam. Just after loading the oven, the problem is getting enough heat to the water in the dough. Throwing water in the oven means there is less heat to cook the dough.  That water to make steam is more cold stuff in the oven. (The heat used to warm the water/make steam is not in the dough – on the other hand that water can convert heat in very high temperature metal into oven into latent heat at a temperature suited for baking bread.) A cloche will provide both thermal inertia and moisture control – if I had a gas oven, I would use a cloche. Cloches are easier and often better than throwing water in the oven.

My approach is simple, I add some thermal inertia to the oven, so the temperature of the oven does not drop too much as I put the bread dough in the oven!

In my oven this usually takes the form of some aluminum castings that I put on the bottom rack of the oven. The aluminum heats rapidly, and the heat rapidly transfers back into the oven environment. I use some aluminum supports from an old table saw that I got from a junkyard. They preheat rapidly and they release heat back  into the oven environment rapidly - much faster than a pizza stone. However, a large cast iron skillet or cast iron griddle works almost as well but needs an extra 5 or 10 minutes of preheat and does not release heat back into the oven environment as fast so there is a bit less oven spring. In any case, the extra thermal inertia heats water vapor coming out of the bread dough to aid in heating keeping the crust elastic and cooking the crumb.

Then, I bake on the center rack of the oven using convection. I bake Artisan Breads using heavy, commercial aluminium (1/2) bake sheets lined with parchment paper or Silpat at 395F convection, dropping the temperature to 325F convection during the last 5 minutes to improve the crust. I bake homestyle breads in loaf pans at 375F convection. I try to arrange the bake so that I load about a kilo (2 pounds) of raw dough into the oven at once. This is two nice sandwich loaves or one large Artisan loaf. If I want to bake a 2-kilo loaf, then I have to add more thermal inertia (iron) and raise the temperature to 450F. Baking a single 1-kilo loaf at 450F convection results in a burned crust long before the crumb is cooked. Bread doughs with fat/oil in them get baked with convection at 350F or 375F.  (High fat pastry, such as pies, get started at 375F convection for a few minutes, then the temperature is dropped to a much lower temperature.)

Baking a single pound of dough in my oven does not produce enough steam in the oven to produce a good loaf. My baking one 1-lb loaf at a time without a cloche results in failure, so I bake two loaves and freeze one. (Or, some breads are just better the next day!!)  It is easier to bake two 1-lb loaves than to drag out a cloche, preheat it, and etc.  All my "bread" recipes have been scaled to between 400 and 600 gr of flour, except with items like baguettes and buns which with their large surface area, and large contact with the baking sheet, work well at 300 gr of flour. (A fresh bun can turn a "sausage" into a very nice meal! Sometimes Artisan Breads are not right for the menu. ) 

When baking breads, after 10 or 15 minutes, I open the oven door and rotate the loaves, this gives me more even baking, and it releases some steam from the oven. I do get a blast of steamy air, so I know there is a lot of moisture in the oven. And, even at the end of the bake, as I take things out of the oven, I again feel the moisture. Thus, baguettes get rotated 2 or 3 times while baking to allow the oven atmosphere to dry. In the old days, with gas ovens, the blast from the oven was always dry.

Much of the lore about baking comes from the old days of wood or coal or gas fired ovens that were vented, so the steam could escape as fast as it was produced.  Even the original electric oven in our current house was vented. 

In Julia Child’s or James Beard’s day, all gourmet kitchens had gas ovens, so an approach that worked was to heat the oven very hot, and throw water in it.  That converted the high temperature of the oven into latent heat at a temperature useful for baking.  When I was  in highschool, my family had such a commercial gas oven; it was the kind of oven that Julia Child and James Beard had in their kitchens.  Those ovens were similar to the ovens that were in the first commercial kitchens I where I cooked professionally. Circa 1970; I threw water in my gas oven when baking bread; Louis Diat was my hero; and I turned out beautiful breads. That was then, and now I use an electric convection oven, and baking is easier. 

This year’s Thanksgiving was smaller, as some had health issues. The menu was more traditional American, so the bread was almost white, made with yeast, and baked in buttered loaf pans at 375F convection.  Such breads can be just as good as, and more appropriate to the menu than “Artisan Breads”. 

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