Pain de Campagne

This is a great French country style bread that uses a starter, you need to make that up the day before. It’s relatively little hassle and makes a great loaf, not as chewy as you might expect.

For the starter (a poolish):
200ml Water
175g White Bread Flour
50g Wholemeal flour
¼ teaspoon Dried Yeast

Mix up your starter and leave it to sponge, covered with cling film, at room temperature for about 8-10 hours. You could leave it for a little less time, especially if you’ve got the heating turned up. When it’s ready it’ll go from looking something like this:

To something like this:

Now to combine the rest of the Ingredients to make the dough:
120ml luke warm Water
250g White Bread Flour
50g Wholemeal Flour
25g Rye Flour
1 ½ tsp Salt
½ tsp Sugar
½ tsp Dried Yeast

Start by flouring a bowl with some of the white flour adding the starter and pouring in your water.

Mix this up to loosen the starter mix and make it easier to combine the other ingredients, then sieve all the other ingredients together into the bowl. Mix up to make a firm dough and tip out onto a floured work top. Work it and knead it for a few minutes and plump it up into a neat round cushion.

Then transfer to an oiled sheet on a baking tray and cover with an oiled bowl to prove for about an hour or until doubled in bulk.

Pre heat the oven to 220 deg C. Dust the bread with more flour and with a very sharp knife make 3 cuts across the top of the dough, then turn the loaf 90 degrees and make a further 3 cuts.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until it sounds hollow when you tap the base of the bread.

This accompanied the soft goats cheese I made a rustic country snack. It’s a nice savoury bread that’s well suited to serving with cheese.