Bread Matters - My First Pain de Campagne

Since we moved away from London we have really missed the pain de campagne and sourdough bread that we used to get most Saturdays at Borough Market (followed by a pint or 2 at the Market Porter - we miss that too..). Recently, we have very happily discovered that the excellent Cheshire Smokehouse do a good sourdough, but we still pined for some tangy, chewy pain de campagne.

So, at the recommendation of fanatical baking friends we have recently invested in a copy of Bread Matters (by Andrew Whitley, formerly of the Village Bakery), and keen to get going on making bread using a natural leaven, it was always going to be the recipe for pain de campagne that I tried first.

The instructions feel quite complicated and not a little daunting when you read them through - but the process was actually pretty straightforward and I was so pleased when everything went totally as described. What astonished me is that the way in which the awful sticky wet mess that you start with, gradually, as you knead it, turns into a beautiful, smooth, springy, silky dough. It has been very difficult to restrain myself from reaching from the flour, but Andrew Whitley is insistent about this, and, of course, he's right.

First you make a wheat leaven. This happens over 4 days - it's purely a matter of mixing flour and water together - it takes about 1 minute to do. The leaven needs to be kept somewhere warm - I used one of my seedling propagators for this. Here's my leaven at the end of its final rise:

The bubbling and rising of the leaven is created entirely by the action of natural yeasts in the environment. I was so pleased at how active the leaven was at this stage.

The next thing you do is add more flour to make a production leaven. Here's mine - you can hopefully see all the nice large bubbles that have formed after I left it for several hours:

After adding further flour and leaving it to rise again, you have a loaf ready to go into the oven - the result you can see at the beginning of this post. I am so pleased with it (have I said that already?). It is delicious and very similar to the loaves we used to buy at Borough.

A final picture - my lunch:

Red and white radishes from the garden, salad leaves from the garden, porchetta from the Cheshire Smokehouse and some delicious slices of freshly baked pain de campagne. Very delicious indeed.