To celebrate the Babes' eighteenth anniversary, Tanna, our Kitchen of the Month, challenged us to make Kathleen Weber's Della Fattoria Pain de Campagne.
Now, I have a love-hate relationship with making sourdough bread. When it works, I'm thrilled. When it doesn't, I curse the waste of ingredients, time, and effort.
This recipe calls for a firm starter. So, I did my research to see how to make this, and found a recipe on the King Arthur Baking Company website. It uses discard as a foundation, and I had some in the refrigerator, so i had nothing to lose (except my discard).
I followed the directions, and ended up with a large lump of dough that did absolutely nothing. Discouraged, I tossed it into the refrigerator until I figured out a disposal method. I went in search of a yeast-based bread instead. (To be honest, I'd rather bake with yeast than starter.) I came across Cathy's recipe for Easy Dutch Oven Pain de Campagne, so that's what I used. I made the Lemon-Rosemary filling, since I have both lemons and rosemary in the backyard. The bread worked out fine, although the filling was barely apparent. That's the way it goes sometimes.
Fast forward a few days. I noticed something strange happening to the firm starter I had tossed back into the fridge. Was it my imagination, or was the starter actually showing some activity? Well, yes, it was. I tried out my new 'toy' to bring it back to life, deciding to try again using the newly revived firm starter.
The resulting dough was lovely, but it didn't have as much oven spring as I would have liked. And, once again, the filling disappeared, although I would get hints of lemon with each bite.
It was an interesting experiment. In the end, I preferred the yeast bread version rather than the sourdough one, based on taste and texture (and success).
For the recipe and description of this bread, go to Tanna's website.
The other Babes made wonderful versions of this bread, so be sure to check them out.
