Beth Hensperger's Pain de Seigle

When I was little, sometimes my father would go to the grocery store where he always indulged his wishes. He would come home not only with what my mother requested but always bought a small round loaf of thinly sliced rye bread. The diameter of the loaf was about three inches and I loved every slice of it that I got to eat (it was his treat, but he always shared with me). There's just something about caraway seeds - they really speak to me and I love rye bread.

So when I was looking through The Bread Bible, my first bread cookbook, I saw that Hensperger had a recipe for sourdough rye bread that I had never noticed before. Her book is not my go-to sourdough cookbook so I guess it had always missed my notice.

This is a three-day bread but my starter was ready to go. Her starter for this bread is made with just bread flour. I feed my starter half and half whole wheat and bread flour, so I decided to skip Day One and go with my already active starter even though it would not be purely the recipe to do this.

Day Two you make a mix of 1 cup of starter, 2 cups lukewarm water, 2 T molasses, 1 1/2 cups rye flour (I used pumpernickel since that was what I had) and 1 1/2 cups bread flour. This rises on the counter overnight.

On Day Three, you stir in 1 1/2 tsp of active dry yeast, 3 T canola oil, 2 T molasses, 4 tsp salt, 4 tsp of caraway seeds (mine were a little heaping), and 1/2 cup of rye flour (I used pumpernickel).

Beat the mixture well and then add 3 or so cups of bread flour 1/2 cup at a time.

Knead well and let bread dough rise for about an hour.

Turn the bread out of the rising bowl and shape into two long loaves on a baking sheet. Cover and let these rise for another 45 minutes to an hour.

Preheat oven to 450. I started preheating as soon as this loaf rise began. When the bread is ready, brush the surface of the loaf with beaten egg and sprinkle with more caraway seeds.

Put bread into oven and lower the temperature to 375. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. Cool completely before slicing. It's WONDERFUL and meets my childhood memories fully.

Beth Hensperger's Pain de Campagne

Using my mother's sourdough starter paired with the deeply complex flavors generated in most of Beth Hensperger's recipes makes me very happy. In this time of the coronavirus, I, like many other people, am baking my heart out.

I give away Mother's starter frequently (about four times in a year) but now have given it to four people during the six or seven weeks so far of the stay-at-home time of the coronavirus. One young man who asked for it then drove to N Georgia to Helen to get flour ground in a local mill, the Nora Mill Granary. The grocery stores were all out of flour (as they continue to be) and he really wanted to get started with his sourdough. Generously, he brought me two huge bags - one of whole wheat and the other of high gluten bread flour.

Meanwhile I have been feeding my starter twice a day and it is really happy:

Hensperger's recipe for Pain de Campagne takes three days. The first one, though, is the making of the starter and mine is already fully functioning. So I used the equivalent amount of starter and began the recipe with Day Two of three.

On Day Two, you make a sponge with 1/2 cup of starter (from the first day) and 2 cups of lukewarm water into which you stir 1 1/2 cups of bread flour and 1 1/2 cups of whole wheat flour. My flours from N Georgia were perfect for this. This mixture rises overnight - it's really wet and rises as a bubbly batter, more or less.

Then on Day Three (two for me), you stir down the sponge and gradually add a cup of bread flour and 4 tsp of salt. Then you add up to 3 more cups of flour - I added about 2 1/2 but I am in Atlanta where it is really humid and I often don't need as much flour as the recipe requires. 

In her recipe, she calls for about 1 1/2 - 2 hours rising, but I left mine for 3 since I was using starter and not fresh yeast. Then I divided the dough in half and put each half in a banneton where it rose for another hour or so.

I baked it one loaf at a time in a cloche in a 500 degree oven. At 20 - 25 minutes I turned the oven down to 450 for 10 minutes. Then I took the top off for about 10 - 15 minutes more. The bread turned out beautifully:

The pictured loaf is the second one. The first one I gave away without taking its photo but it was prettier even than this one. The crust is crunchy and delicious and the bread has a nice crumb. I want to make it again and again!

Popovers from Sourdough Starter

Delicious concoctions can be made with sourdough starter, left in the container after you have made bread. These recipes use unfed starter. A book I love for sourdough baking is Artisan Sourdough by Emilie Raffa. She has some recipes at the end of the book for using that leftover starter.

I decided to experiment with trying her easy dijon parsley popovers. I had bought a beautiful popover pan and had only used it once with my granddaughter. This one asks you to heat the pan in the oven while the oven reaches 450. My popover pan holds six large popovers, exactly the number created by this recipe.

Putting this together was quick and the results were delectable.

First you whisk together three eggs. Then you add 1/2 cup of leftover starter and whisk that together.

Meanwhile you melt 2 T of unsalted butter in 1 1/4 cups of whole milk on low heat on the stove. As soon as the butter melted, I took it off of the heat so that it wouldn't cook the eggs when I added it to the mix. 

 Next I added the mustard, garlic powder, sea salt (I used Himalayan pink salt), and some freshly ground pepper. Oh, and a T of finely chopped fresh parsley. You can see the green flecks.

 Slowly I whisked in the milk/melted butter mix. And finally I whisked in one cup of all-purpose flour.

I pulled the hot, hot, hot pan out of the oven and sprayed the cups with canola oil cooking spray. Then I poured the batter into the cups, making them as even as possible.

The popovers popped up high and light as they cooked and they were oh, so beautiful.

 I had one with a bowl of homemade potato soup topped with bacon and sour cream. What a delicious dinner that was!

This post is being written in the time of the coronavirus. Many of us are isolated at home. I gave the rest of the popovers and the remaining soup to a friend and her husband. She met my car near her home and took the food through my passenger side back window so we could stay six feet apart.

In our own homes, we all enjoyed them as well as the soup which was cooked with a rind of cheese as I often do. Turned out the cheese rind I pulled out of the bag was a hot pepper cheese, giving the potato soup a kick that I loved but will never be able to repeat!.

A Sourdough Starter Story

My mother ordered 100-year-old sourdough starter from San
Francisco when I was 15. She shared it with me when I left home
so I could continue baking sourdough bread. I have baked
bread almost every week my whole life. 

My mother died at age 93 in 2015 and when we cleaned out
her house, I found a blackened quart jar on her screened
porch in Mississippi - not refrigerated and not used for at
least four years. I brought it into the house and opened the
jar. The jar's interior (and suddenly the whole
house) smelled like the sewer. My sister was horrified
that I was going to empty this jar, but after I pulled off
spoonful after spoonful of black gunk, in the center
I found pure white starter. 

We had to leave the windows wide open in the house for hours
to get rid of the awful smell. And to bring the starter home with me,
I triple bagged it in zip-lock bags like a plastic version of the
stacked Russian dolls.

I brought Mother’s starter back to Atlanta to see if I could revive it.
I put about a tablespoon of it in each of nine small bowls and fed
each of the bowls about 1/4 cup flour and 1/4 cup water.
I covered all of them and went to work. 

When I got home it was like the starter that ate my kitchen. Thrilled
to have food after four years, the starters had all bubbled up and
over the rims of the bowls in which I had left them. My kitchen
counter was covered with glorious, revived, 151-year-old starter.
Sadly, there are no photos. I have been baking with it several
times weekly ever since and sharing it with everyone who
expresses an interest. 

In case you have any worries about the fact that it was in
the Mississippi heat, unfed, for four or so years, a sourdough
starter was scraped off of a pottery jar in an Egyptian
tomb and brought back to life. Microbes are amazing
survivors! (see Rob Dunn’s book: Never Home Alone).

I love knowing that this starter now includes my microbes
as well as my mother's, microbes from my Atlanta kitchens
over the years, and those from my childhood home in
Mississippi.

As you use a sourdough starter, your microbes and those
from your kitchen will be added as well!