Pain de Campagne Recipe
My pain de campagne recipe offers a guideline for timings, but you can easily adapt this to fit around your schedule. In terms of dough hydration for this pain de champagne recipe, I'm working with 71.5% but feel free to adjust this slightly based on the flour you are using or personal preference.
Servings 0
Ingredients
Sourdough Ingredients
- 100 g rye sourdough starter (I'm using a pretty firm and mature starter at roughly 100% hydration for this recipe. If you are new to sourdough baking and have used my how-to-guide to making a rye sourdough starter, make sure you add some extra flour so it's not too wet. I would recommend to use 67g instead of just 50g wholemeal rye flour and slightly less water, 144g instead of 160g.)
- 100 g strong white flour
- 50 g wholemeal wheat flour
- 50 g wholemeal rye flour
- 160 g water, lukewarm
Main Dough Ingredients
- 250 g strong white flour
- 100 g wholemeal wheat flour
- 50 g wholemeal rye flour
- 7 g salt
- 255 g water, lukewarm
- 300 g sourdough ferment (From the previous day. The rest goes back into the fridge for your next bake.)
Instructions
How to make pain de campagne
Day 1 (7am) - Refresh your sourdough starter
- In a medium bowl, combine all sourdough ingredients, cover with a lid and keep at room temperature until the next day.
Day 2 (7am) - Prepare the main dough
- Combine all main dough ingredients and knead for about 10 mins.
- The dough should be quite soft, it should still slightly stick to hands and worktop, so carefully add a little more water in case the consistency is too tight and firm. Equally, if the dough is too wet to be workable, carefully add a little bit more flour. In general, for pain de campagne, wetter dough is better dough but it should be easy to work with and definitely not runny.
- Shape the dough into a pile on your worktop and cover with a plastic bowl. Moisten the rim of the bowl before placing it there. The dough is going to expand and flatten and will stick to the bowl otherwise.
- Leave the dough for about an hour.
- Use your dough scrapers to stretch and fold the dough a few times to tighten its structure.
- Prepare a plate with wholemeal flour, then pick up the dough and dip it into the flour, turn it over to ensure it's completely covered.
- Transfer the dough to a liberally floured round proving basket, seam-side up.
- Cover the proving basket with a polythene bag and put it into the fridge. Make sure you don't put the bag on too tightly, the dough shouldn't stick to the plastic bag once risen.
Day 2 (7pm) - Final prep and bake!
- Take the proving basket out of the fridge and leave the dough to warm back up at room temperature for about two hours or so.
- Preheat the oven to 220°C.
- Line a baking tray with baking paper or preheat your La Cloche baking dome if you have one.
- Swiftly but carefully move (flip over) the loaf from basket to the tray or bottom of your baking dome.
- Cut some slashes into the top to give it a nice pattern.
- Bake at 220°C for 10 mins, and at 200°C for a further 40 mins.
- Leave to cool on a wire rack.