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.

Rain rain go to Spain

That's what Ant & Bee say and while I've nothing against the Spanish, I do wish the rain would go somewhere else. The weekend's been a washout and the choice for the boys yesterday was cabin fever or horizontal rain. We went for the second option, poor things. So maybe today they can stay in and read their - criminally now out of print - Ant and Bee books.

It's frustrating for grown-ups too, as it's difficult to do anything much in the garden at the moment. Everything is still doing well, but it would be nice to get some proper sunshine to go along with the moisture. We've been enjoying our first crops of salad leaves and radishes - a real sign that the year's progressing away from winter towards summer. Another sign is hopefully what will be another bumper crop of plums for us from our tree. It's hard to believe that these tiny green blighters will be our main fruit crop in late summer and early autum:



And despite the greyness of the day there's a welcome splash of colour from some azaleas that survived their transplant out of our herb bed to a more suitable location:



And I say the plums will be our main crop of fruit, but the tomatoes are going to run them pretty close for that award. We have a thriving colony of seedlings in the greenhouse at the moment, mostly tomatoes along with some squash and cucumbers:



Some of these are hardening off during the day for growing outside. Once the weather clears, we'll set up our mini greenhouse for them to get used to nights outside too (at the moment, we're shifting them back into the greenhouse at the end of the day). We have high hopes for the tomatoes, especially if we have the kind of baking summer the forecasters are predicting. Last year, the Bloody Butchers were probably the pick of the varieties we grew. They're easy to spot with their 'potato' style leaves and they're doing pretty well too:



So everything is still ticking along - here's hoping that better weather is on its way and we're not continually trying to send our rainy days to Spain.

Wildflowers, brandy & manure

There seem to be a lot of flower photos turning up here at the moment. One of the pleasures of May is seeing all the flowers and blossom transforming the garden and turning it towards summer. The picture at the top of this post is a lovely wildflower, sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis). And the next one is of the first flowers coming out on the loganberry:



After I hacked the thing back over the winter, I wondered what sort of growth we'd get on it this year. It seems to be growing back with some vigour and we should have plenty of loganberries at the end of the summer. One of their most important tasks will be to go into our Rumtopf, preserving the summer's fruits in brandy through autumn and winter to enliven Christmas trifle, or to turn into a wonderful 'Rumtopf sundae', with brandy-soaked fruit, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and a few Belgian chocolate sprinkles on the top. Yum.

For those who don't know, Rumtopf is traditionally made in Germany with all kinds of fruit, sugar and rum in an earthenware crock. But there are versions pretty much everywhere, including a Swiss version called 'Officer's Jam' and one from Suffolk apparently called Hodgkin. Whatever you call it, it's great. The fruit makes the best bottom layer of a trifle and the liquid, strained from the fruit, a delicious liqueur. Anyway, here's our sundae. You can just about see a loganberry peeping out on the bottom right corner:



On a slightly more prosaic note, our thicket of green manure (see this post) is no more. Or rather, I strimmed it down to ground level and then pegged some garden membrane over the top. This is a 'no-dig' method of getting the green manure to work, so we'll see how it goes. You can see our next crop of green manure in the raised bed on the right in the picture below. This is going to be cut down and then dug in to the bed with some more compost and will probably then be used as a bed for veg like cabbages, onions, shallots, garlic...

Flowering

The mostly fine Spring weather has meant that everything seems to be going well in the garden. In some cases a little too well!

The tomato seedlings are straining at the sides of their pots and demanding to be planted out. We're intending to try to grow half the greenhouse tomatoes by the 'ring culture' method this year: this involves a bed of gravel or similar (in our case some of the rubbish we've dug out of the garden) and a circular bottomless pot. The only problem is that turning to the web for sources of information reveals a bewildering plethora of different methods and various bits of advice.

It'll be a case of testing it out this year - fingers crossed we choose a successful technique. We have plenty of plants which we will grow according to a few different methods (including grow bags), so if the summer's as good as it's predicted to be, we're looking forward to a good crop.

As we are with our various other little projects. There's nothing quite like fresh broad beans, especially in summer salads (they go really well with goats cheese and herbs like dill or mint). Last year was an unmitigated bean disaster; this year we're more hopeful, not least from the bean plants putting out the lovely little flowers in the picture at the top of this post.

These plants are growing in a raised bed, mostly filled with our own compost, so we shouldn't see the problem of poor soil quality that put a curse on our beans last year. The plants are looking good and healthy. We have a secondary crop in one of the other beds, but these are the first ones to be planted out:



The broad beans aren't the only flowering plants in the garden at the moment. The plum blossom may have passed, but next door's apple tree is still looking lovely with its pinkish white bloom. The tomatoes are starting to show their first flowers, still closed, but a reminder that we have to get a move on with the next phase:



We've even been enjoying the first produce from the garden (excepting the rhubarb, which has been going strong for a while). The salad leaves are ready to eat and make a lovely addition to a sandwich, while thinning out the radishes not only gives us a few small radishes as a little treat, but also gives us their tops, which make a great addition to something like our spiced kale. Here's the main salad bed, looking pretty good, with its rather makeshift twine as protection against birds digging around:



The bare bit of ground that we cleared for planting with grass has been modestly transformed now that the seeds are growing. It will no doubt need some more seed to fill in some of the gaps, but I'm really pleased with how well it's doing. It won't be long now before it gets its first cut with the mower:



Here's the 'before' picture:



And last of all (but not least), the latest beer is now ready and drinking really nicely. Here's the post from when it was brewed. It's a version of a recipe for Timothy Taylor's Landlord and has a very pleasing balance of sweetness and hop that isn't a million miles from the original:



Cheers!