Pain de Campagne

The story of the Pain de Campagne really begins during my second attempt at Portuguese Sweet Bread.  Trying desperately to get that recipe right, I learned several lessons about bread baking.  One of those is that you are going to have to get your hands dirty.

I started this BBA Challenge so excited to finally have a use for the dough hook attachment that came with my stand mixer.  Apartment dwellers know that a kitchen gadget must prove itself worthy to occupy its valuable real estate on any shelf, in any drawer.  And I have been renewing the lease, giving the dough hook the benefit of the doubt, for many years now.  Many times I have questioned my decision to let it stay on without getting much in return.  I began to hope that these exercises with yeast dough would give the hook an opportunity to prove true my optimism about its potential.

But at the heart of a successful loaf of bread, like so much else in life, is a relationship.   When your dough is building its primary relationship with a mechanical hook, things may not turn out well. 

I was just reading Peter Reinhardt’s description of a notable Parisian baker. When baking sourdough miche in Lionel Polâine’s shop, each apprentice is responsible for seeing his loaves through the entire process, “mixing and baking as well as stacking his own firewood and stoking his own fire.” The baker and his bread are in this together.

You cannot really know what is going on with your dough unless you push up your sleeves and introduce yourself.  I may have been more free to multitask with my dough flopping away awkwardly in the Kitchen Aid, but I have also been too distant from the bread, more concerned with the recipe's instructions than with the actual dough.  It is while you are kneading that you begin to know the dough, to see how it responds to you, to discern what it needs.  

I have now begun to knead by hand.

When my hands press into the yeasty mass, I begin to experience a cross between the maternal-umbilical-fetal bond and a science-fiction, Jedi-Avatar, mind-body transformation. 

I am the dough and the dough is I.

Ok. That is taking it a little bit far, but now that I am kneading by hand it is true that I have much more information as I work through the process of each recipe.  Kneading the Pain de Campagne, I could feel the dough begin to spring back against my force and I knew that the gluten strands were beginning to grow. 

But I could also tell that those gluten strands were not as developed as they should be when the timer went off to signal the end of the kneading time.  So I kneaded a little longer until, ladies and gentlemen, I had WINDOW PANE!  As I stretched the dough, it did not break but instead held tight until only a thin film remained, letting light pass through.  The "window pane test" is the SAT for yeast dough readiness and I had never achieved it as clearly as I did here.

As you can see, this bread has a small amount of whole-wheat flour, which gives it a slightly sandy texture and makes it a little dense.   But it also gives it that wonderful multi-grain nuttiness and a hearty texture. Pain de Campagne has been a big hit over here. WJ immediately began to refer to these loaves as “your famous bread." As in, “Mommy, can I have a slice of your famous bread with some apple butter? No, I think I just want it plain.”

Not much is gained, I am confirming again and again, when you try to do things the quick and easy way.  Even with the dough, you have to put in the time, the communication, the bonding.

Too far again.  I know.

Dinner party

I have a rule.  No repeats.  At least not in terms of The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I am behind many of the other BBA Challenge bakers and since each attempted loaf of bread imprisons me for at least the better part of a day, I am on a mission to keep moving forward. 

I have broken that rule only once—when the Portuguese Sweet Bread recipe chewed me up and spit me out and I was determined to have better results.  But my second loaf was not markedly better than the first, thus enforcing my conviction to keep moving forward.

No repeats.  But I have another rule too.  It goes something like this: The Barefoot Contessa knows what she is talking about. 

This weekend I spent time planning for some guests at dinner and was trying to keep it simple.  It is so easy to fall into the trap of wanting to impress.  So, as I often do when such occasions arise, I closed the Google “winter dinner party menu ideas” search screen on my laptop and asked myself, “What would Ina do?”

Ina Garten, The Barefoot Contessa, warns regularly against dinner party planning that keeps you locked in the kitchen while your guests are partying and also advices that what people really enjoy is comfort, not fancy:

“This isn’t the time to test that intriguing recipe from the latest Gourmet; this is the time for something tried-and-true that will make people smile.” 

Ina Garten’s philosophy about entertaining helped me reign in my visions of grandeur.

I considered my goals for the evening with our guests and came up with these: enjoying the company of friends without all of us having to pay for babysitters, pretending to be grown-ups with social lives, breaking the pattern of weekend evenings sitting in front of a Netflix, shoving at Dave on our too small couch.

Channeling Ina and holding fast to my hopes for our dinner party, I found myself in conflict.  The simple menu I was envisioning would include a fail-safe roasted chicken, a salad brought by our guests and some homemade bread.

Homemade bread!  It is baked in advance, freeing me from the kitchen. And it is an ultimate in the comfort food arena.  Ina would be so proud.

Sometimes in order to be true to one of your personal policies, you have to breach another. You have probably already done the arithmetic here.  My conviction to keep it simple was going to force me to repeat a bread recipe.  I opened my baking text to Pain de Campagne, a bread I tried first a few weeks ago and loved.

I feel a little sad that the battle this weekend in the kitchen, the encounter between Peter Reinhardt and his distant, aspiring  apprentice (me), the skirmish between said aspiring apprentice and her Kitchen Aid mixer, who has been rebelling against this challenge at every possible opportunity, that none of this brought me closer to my goal of baking my way through this cookbook.

But I feel good that I could perceive that of my two principles one stood higher, held more value, offered more reward.

As I am typing now I am realizing that I never posted a description of my first attempt with the Pain de Campagne.  I will get it to you this week.  For the time being, what are your favorite dinner party ideas? Remember, we are keeping it simple!

Here is the roasted chicken (I omit the dried plums): Apricot Glazed Roasted Chicken with Dried Plums and Sage.

Shortbread

There is time today for baking.  My mother’s shortbread recipe, which is not really hers but Mrs. Brennan’s.  Shortbread has always meant Christmas in my childhood home.  As we light the second candle of Advent this week, it is a good time for making preparations, for making shortbread.

WJ and I made a batch of shortbread a few months ago, even though it was not Christmas or Advent, because I had left a stick of butter on the counter for over a week and it was beginning to haunt me.  My mother always says that shortbread is better if the butter is a little rancid, which makes most of my contemporaries cringe.  When that butter on the counter caught my eye, however, I knew its fate was a small batch of Scottish cookies.

WJ climbed onto a stool next to me as I cut cookies that day. “How did you learn to make shortbread?” he asked, stretching the word “learn” magically into two syllables for emphasis.  “I learned to from my mother,” I replied.

“And did she learn how to make shortbread from her mother?” he asked.

I explained to him that this was a complicated question.  My grandmother did make shortbread but really Mrs. Brennan had taught both my mother and my grandmother.  Mrs. Brennan, I told WJ, was a wonderful friend.  She and her big Scottish family lived in the basement of the house my grandmother rented when my mother was young.  It is a brilliant story of women supporting each other, of strangers becoming family, of a community finding room for those just arrived.

As the beater turns the butter and sugar today into fluffy goodness and as I slice the sheet of delicate dough into the most perfect diamonds I can manage, I am thinking about this season of waiting, of watching my mother make shortbread, of the work of preparing both heart and home.

I am thinking about the stories we tell in this time, the stories I hope WJ will feel a part of and find a place in. 

Each night in Advent before he lights the candles at our table, WJ prays the last sentence of our mediation for the season.  Teach us to live as children of God.  At quiet time he gathers the nativity set together and carries it off into his room to tell the story of Mary and Joseph and a baby quietly to himself again and again.

 Those months ago, after pulling lightly browned cookies from the oven and sharing them together, WJ said to me, “Maybe someday I will have a child and when I make shortbread my child will ask me, How did you learn to make shortbread?  And I will tell him, I learned it from my mother and she learned it from her mother, and she learned from a woman from Scotland who lived in their basement.

I hope so. I hope so. May all of these stories be yours.

*This post is part of SteadyMom's 30 Minute Blog Challenge (26 minutes!) and is also linked to Chatting at the Sky's Tuesday Unwrapped.

Portuguese sweet bread

Don’t be fooled by the picture above.  Peter Reinhart is kicking my butt.  And I am morally opposed to using the word butt.  That is, however, where I am finding myself on this one.

Despite its appearance, my Portuguese sweet bread was not a huge success.

Last Sunday morning I rose early and started the sponge while making some morning tea.  As it bubbled away, I resumed our normal Sunday morning routines, getting us all ready for church.  What could be better than this? I asked myself this as I padded around the apartment in my slippers: warm tea at my lips, my family together in the early hours of the day, homemade bread growing itself in the kitchen.

But when I wandered back into the kitchen at the appointed time to check the sponge and move on to Step Two of the recipe, the mixture had definitely not doubled in size.  The cool humidity of the day was making the yeast sluggish.  I decided to come back to it after I was completely ready to go, but when I did I could tell the sponge needed even more time.  Which is exactly what I did not have.  If I left the sponge working for the four hours we would be away, I would be putting bread in the oven around 2AM.  I had to keep going with the recipe, doubled or not. 

I donned a spirit of hope and quickly mixed in the next ingredients, kneaded with the help of the electric stand mixer while I put on shoes and lipstick, covered the dough and set off for church in the city.

What I returned to four hours later was a sad looking lump.  My bread, it seemed, was suffering from failure to thrive.  Already halfway through the process, I debated the future of these loaves: the oven or the trash bin?  Mustering another burst of optimism, I decided to proceed with the recipe. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice offered little in terms of pictorial support for this particular recipe. It was a little bit possible, a very little bit, that this lumpy sadness was what the dough was expected to look like.

I divided the dough, shaped it, and left it for its final rise.  Reinhart did not provide many pictures of this dough’s progress, but he did provide this description for the bread as it should be as you prepare to put it into the oven, “Proof… until the dough fills the pans fully, doubling in size and overlapping the edges slightly.”

Just take a look at the photo below.

This is the point at which I knew, and I apologize in advance for having to say it again, that my butt was kicked.  And still, I could not resign myself to putting the dough into the garbage.  Why?  This last stage is called proofing.  It is seeking the physical evidence that this bread is healthy and growing and working to its potential.  Clearly my dough was lacking proof.

I think it is the scent.  Yeast lives and you can smell it. It is difficult as a parent and a teacher to turn one’s back on life, no matter how sluggish it is.  I heated the oven and popped the pathetically empty pie pans onto the rack.

And, as if out of gratitude for my persistence with them, the loaves did perk up a bit in the oven. The bread filled the pans and browned glowingly.  And I ran around the apartment in a corresponding glow calling everyone to come and see.  My bread was making strides toward success. 

But there are things that cannot be rushed and despite my hopefulness and optimism and persistence and determination, I had pushed my Portuguese sweet bread sponge to be ready for the next stage before it truly was.  And everything thereafter was lacking.

Here is what Peter says about the Portuguese sweet bread, “The bread will soften as it cools, resulting in a very soft, squishy loaf.”  Soft and squishy—that is exactly what my bread was not.  It was dry.  The color was lovely, the scent was delightfully floral, the flavor had hints of citrus, and the texture was... dry.  A heavy slathering of butter was not even remedy enough.  WJ, the quintessential dough-belly left chunks of sweet bread on his plate at dinner, a sure sign of failure.

There are worse ways to spend a Sunday than hoping in some dough that is not ready to fulfill its potential.  But there are things that cannot be rushed.  Peter Reinhart is breaking me down.  I think I am taking it slow but I am beginning to see that I don’t yet understand even the half of it.

Apple crispish

When you have made a commitment to taking it slow and you have a school holiday right smack in the middle of October, you go to the pick-your-own farm.  You watch your child delight in nature and in his cousins and you drive home with a trunk full of the goodness of the earth.  And you hope your child’s superstitiously declared desire to “eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away” will hold out for at least another month so as to insure a sizable dent in the bounty of fruit you are lugging out of the car.

And when your child surveys the wonders of his harvest and announces with joy and anticipation, as you attempt to find places to store this collection of fruit in your tiny city apartment kitchen, “I am ready to bake,” you have only one choice.  You put the catching up on emails, the finishing of paperwork, the making of dinner on hold and you bake with your child. 

With great excitement, WJ washed and chopped apples as I made an attempt at overhauling the Joy of Cooking’s apple crisp recipe.  I used whole-wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose and substituted half honey and half agave syrup for the sugar.  I knew the topping would be wet instead of crumbly with these substitutions so I planned to add some oatmeal, but found that I only had steel cut, which I have never baked with and this did not seem a good time to try.  I added a handful of almonds to the dough and food-processed it.  Still wet.  A handful of wheat germ; still wet.  Staring into the open cabinets, I saw the Honey Nut Cheerios and thought to myself, couldn’t hurt!  So I added a big handful of those too and chopped them in the food processor.  The dough was doughier but still not the chunky crumbs you usually sprinkle atop a crisp.

Our apple crisp was not all that crispy; maybe it was crispish, a little more like a cobbler.  But it was crunchy thanks to the nuts and the Cheerios.  And it was warm and sweet on a cool fall evening, keeping us together at the table for a few minutes more.

Have you picked your fall fruits yet?