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!

A Lesson in High Hydration Sourdough Bread

I love making bread with sourdough starter, using only the starter as a natural yeast/leaven for the bread. I bake out of lots of cookbooks but particularly enjoy Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa.

I promised my brother I would put photos of the process here so that he could follow them as he makes his first sourdough loaf. I made the high hydration sourdough recipe in her book yesterday and today and will provide a photographic journey through the loaf.

Here is my bubbly starter that has been fed daily for at least four days. When I'm going out of town I put the starter in the fridge, but the rest of the time, it is bubbling on my counter every day.

When I start this process, I turn the light on in my oven. The light will heat the oven just a little and I can let the dough rise in the oven overnight, with a jumpstart from the light warmth on this coldish winter night.

Good bakers weigh everything so I live by my digital scale and try to be as exact as possible - I'm not perfect, by any means and am often off by a gram or so but it doesn't seem to matter. I weigh the starter and then weigh the water and stir them together.

I weigh the flour and the salt and stir them into the yeast/water mixture.

I give it a bit of a rest - maybe 30 minutes. Then I form it into a ball. It helps for that part to use wet hands, so I generally hold my hand under the faucet and shake the water off and form the loaf with a rather wet hand. I cover the bowl with a damp towel, put it into the oven and close the door. I turn off the oven light and go to bed, leaving the bread to rise overnight.

The next morning, the dough should be ready to form into a loaf. So I turn it out onto a floured counter and shape it into a loaf.  

I put the loaf seam side up into a banneton that is lined with linen and dusted heavily with flour.

I cover the banneton with a damp towel to rise while the oven heats to 500 F - takes my oven about 40 minutes to get there. I put my cloche in which the bread will bake into the oven while it preheats.

As we get closer to 500, I get the bread ready. I take parchment paper and cut a circle a little larger than the banneton.

When the oven hits 500, I put a no-edge cookie sheet over the parchment paper topped banneton and flip the whole thing over.

Then I lift the banneton off of the risen loaf very carefully. I made a huge mistake here. I had washed the linen liner of my banneton and although I had floured it, I obviously hadn't floured it enough and the bread dough stuck to it. What a mess! But all was not lost. It did look pretty bad and lost a lot of its rise because of the sticking episode - see how folded over it looks below.

Not to be defeated, I plowed ahead. I also am terrible with the lame. I have learned that the lame seems to be easier to use if I rub the bread all over with flour first, so I did that.

I take the cloche out of the oven (carefully) and remove the top. Lifting the cookie sheet, I slide the bread on its parchment paper into the bottom of the cloche.

I cover the cloche and the bread bakes covered for 25 minutes. Then I turn the temperature down to 450 and it bakes covered for ten more minutes. Then I remove the cover.

The above photo is how it looked after that amount of time. I put the bread uncovered back into the 450 degree oven for about 15 minutes more and then it's done. You can tell that it's done by the darkened brown crust. But if you want to know for sure, use an instant thermometer. The internal temperature of the loaf should be between 200 - 212. You can't read the digital screen but this one measured 212 F when I took it out.

When it's cooling, I always listen to the crackling of the crust. My oven which has been at 500 degrees runs its cooling motor automatically even when it's off until it has cooled down, so that's the hum you hear in the background, but turn your sound up so you can LISTEN to the crackling of the cooling bread!

And despite the almost tragedy of sticking to the linen, the slices were still lovely. The large hole at the top is because of the fold that happened as a result of the sticking but the bread is absolutely delicious!

Delicious bread with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar!

My bread roots

My bread baking was inspired by my mother. In the eighth grade I had to do a home-ec project. At the time I think she was considering becoming a bread baker - she was a great home cook and this would be a new skill for her. She provided me with cookbooks and I baked a different kind of bread every week for six or eight weeks.

The whole family enjoyed the bread and one of the breads from my project, Monte Carlo Bread, a white bread with cardamom and currants, became her signature bread. I still have the cookbook in which we found the recipe -

   

And here's the Monte Carlo bread recipe:

She tried a few other breads along the way but always had Monte Carlo bread in her freezer, wrapped to give away to any friend who dropped by, any repairman who came to work on something in the house, or to toast for us for breakfast.

I did the home-ec project in the 8th grade, so she started baking bread after that and was an eager bread baker during my high school years (1962 - 1966). Somewhere in there when I was 15, she ordered sourdough starter that was 100 years old, from San Francisco. She kept that starter going all the rest of her life.

When she died in 2015, she had not been cooking or baking much at all in the last few years of her life. She was 93 when she died. When my sister and I went to Mississippi to begin cleaning out the house, I found a quart jar on the back porch. It was not in the refrigerator and was black, black, black on the inside.

I stared at the jar as I realized that it was her "100 year-old starter," now 152 years old. The starter had been sitting unrefrigerated probably for three or so years on a hot Mississippi screened back porch. I picked up the jar and headed for the kitchen.

Using some hot water around the lid and all of my strength, I screwed open the canning lid and lifted it off. A smell worse than the sewer poured into the room and could be experienced throughout the house. Totally gross and beyond decrepit, the starter seemed all but lost. I was not daunted, though and spooned the black goo out and into the garbage disposal. 

In the very center of the jar, in the heart of the smelly stuff, was some pure white sourdough starter still remaining. While my sister opened every nearby window to try to get rid of the odor, I put the white starter into a plastic bag and triple bagged it before taking it home with me to Atlanta.

In my Atlanta kitchen, I divided the starter into about eight or nine bowls and added 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of water to each bowl. I covered the bowls with a wet kitchen towel and left home to go to work for the day. When I walked into my kitchen at the end of the day, it was like the monster that had eaten my kitchen!

Delighted to be fed and relishing the opportunity finally to have food, the starter yeast had gone rogue and bubbled all over my counters. 

I was THRILLED. So I bottled up the starter and began feeding it regularly. I now use it every single week to make the best ever bread with natural yeast.

A number of years ago, I read Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn. He studied sourdough starter and said that it contains microbes from every place it has been. As a result, everyone's starter is unique.

I love thinking that every time I make sourdough bread, my mother's microbes and the microbes from her Mississippi kitchen are mixing with my microbes and those in my Atlanta kitchen as well as with the original microbes from San Francisco 155 years ago.

Carrement Chocolat, the Fancy Cake from Dorie Greenspan (Baking Chez Moi)

My sister came to Atlanta for her birthday (September 4) on Labor Day weekend. I wanted to bake her a cake - I am fifteen years older than she and used to bake her cakes when she was a little girl. So I went out of order in Baking Chez Moi and baked the cake on the cover of the book.

Now I can say I baked the cake on the cover, but mine was a far cry from the gorgeous cake on the cover. Mine tasted incredible but was not a work of art.

Hers is a work of art.

I weighed the ingredients and put the cake together in stages as she recommends. So I made the ganache, the chocolate shards, the syrup, the filling on the day before. I made the cake the day of the gathering to celebrate my sister. I wish I had made the whole thing the day before.

I baked it in a pan with tall sides.

It's a one layer cake that is then sliced and the filling put in between the sliced off top and the bottom.

Here's how it looked in the end:

But even though it didn't look like the book cover, it was melt in your mouth delicious and I would make it again for another special occasion.