I am a student at the National Bakery School, London Southbank University, England. For our advanced bread assignment we were split into groups and each group given a different type of bread. My group of 3 got pain de campagne. We have not perviously made this bread and were given no information on it. So in researching a recipe we can across this site and have followed the recipe for the starter in "Beginners' Blog - a starter from scratch". It has been my job in the group to cultivate the starter, keeping it at home with me. I was a bit worried because it is so cold in England now that I would have trouble getting it started but it has been refreshed every day and is still going strong!
We also used a recipe posted on this site 1st January 2010 Pain de Campagne (100% Sourdough) by rossnroller, whom I have to thank again for explaining the term "autolyse".
In order to meet the assignment requirements we had to calculate the recipe and draw up a specification sheet which we did using the bakers percentages give with the recipe. Our only problem was that we really need to get this bread made in class time, which is only 6 hours! We decided to skip the overnight stay in the fridge and see what we got.
Other than the fridge stage we followed the recipe and sadly we did not actual get anything worth while out of our efforts! But our tutour felt that this was due more to the fact that the dough was very sticky and hard to work with therefore the gluten structure did not hold up and although the bread rose in the oven it deflated when it came out of the oven. Our tutor then suggested recalculating the water in the recipe, which we have but just to make sure that the overnight stay in the fridge is not essential for our success, I stayed after class today to make up another batch of dough. I have used our recalculated recipe and so far so good much easier to handle an resembling something more like we expected. It is restting in the fridge at uni and in the morning I will be in before my class mates to finish it off. Fingers crossed we should get bread this time!
Later this week we are going to try it again with the recalculated recipe without the overnight stay in the fridge so we can compare results.
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