Pain de Campagne Poilane

Last week I experimented with another recipe in Bernard Clayton Jr's book The Breads of France.

It's a country bread made by one of the famous French bakers of the '50s, Pierre Poilane.

The recipe makes one very large loaf, or four 1-lb loaves. I opted for 4 loaves - three baguettes and one round loaf.

This is the third recipe I've tried from the book, and it was the most difficult. I'm not sure I added enough flour - the dough was very soft. And I'm not sure I cooked the loaves long enough - they were a little dense in the center.

However, we thoroughly enjoyed the baguette we ate with the bean stew on Sunday night.

I think it will take some practice to get the feel for this bread dough. Fortunately, even the not-so-perfect experiments taste good.

Pain aux Noix

Here's another of my occasional posts on baking my way through Bernard Clayton, Jr.'s excellent book, The Breads of France and How to Make Them in Your Own Kitchen (Bobbs Merrill 1978).

I'm not going to share the recipe with you - this is not a baking blog - but if you like to bake, I recommend you track this book down and give the recipes a try.

These are Pain aux Noix - and they came out looking just like the picture in the book!

They are made with whole wheat flour, additional bran, and a half pound of walnuts in the three one-pound loaves.

They are dense and delicious, full of nutty whole-wheat flavor. They make great cheesey toast, and cheese sandwiches.

I think I have to go eat a slice now.

P.S. I used this bread to make cheese sandwiches to take on the plane when visiting my mother in Montreal. The sandwiches were great, but we didn't need to eat them all. The next day I put the remains of a sandwich on my mother's snowy verandah railing for the birds. This squirrel found it, devoured it, and spent the next day waiting hopefully for us to hand out more sandwiches. (This bread has a lot of walnuts!)

Cheese and Tomato Sandwich

Our tomato plants are doing great this year.

The other day we celebrated with our first cheese and tomato sandwich of the season.

I defrosted a loaf of Hawaiian bread to commemorate the event.

I'm not sure I would go out of my way to eat coconut and tomato together, but the hazelnuts in the bread were great with the cheese, and the whole sandwich was pretty darned good, especially with the fresh basil - the extra touch that took it over the top.

Hazelnut Coconut Bread

This is the first bread I've made from The Breads of France, and it is a winner.

The author, Bernard Clayton, Jr., says it sells at Fauchon, the Paris food emporium, under the name of Pain Hawaiien (Hawaiian bread). Instead of macadamia nuts, the French use hazelnuts, which go surprisingly well with coconut.

The recipe made 4 small loaves. I couldn't find small enough pans, so I used the cardboard loaf pans usually used for baking loaf cakes as gifts. Unfortunately the cardboard is not very thick, and the pans burned and turned black in the oven. Fortunately the bread was not damaged, just a little dark on the bottom.

It's a fine-crumb bread, and the coconut and hazelnuts give it a munchy texture. It goes well with cheddar, and makes great toast.

Clayton is a proponent of freezing fresh bread. He says even if you bake a loaf early in the week to eat on the weekend, you should freeze it and then defrost it the day you intend to eat it.

I'm not sure my bread palate is that refined, but we'll definitely be eating this bread out of the freezer in a few weeks.

The Breads of France

I just found a great book - The Breads of France and how to make them in your own kitchen by Bernard Clayton, Jr.

Larry and I relished the bread when we were in France last summer, but this author took it a step further and learned from the bakers how to make the bread at home.

It's a book from the 70s, with black and white pictures of Parisians and their bread that look like they're from the '50s. Clayton himself is an anachronism - a picture shows him kneading dough, tie neatly in place. Then putting a loaf in one of his indoor woodfire ovens, tie still crisply knotted.

I thought I would enjoy it as a quirky book, but then the recipes drew me in. Clayton really baked these loaves, using American flour and standard equipment (although he has a woodburning oven, the recipes all work in a gas or electric one), and came up with the same texture and flavor he remembered from his visit to France.

I am intrigued, and determined to bake my way through this book.

Fortunately, bread freezes well, so we won't have to eat everything I bake fresh from the oven. (The first recipe makes 4 loaves of bread.) Although we will be tempted. Does anything smell better than fresh-baked bread?

I'll let you know how it goes along the way.