pain a l'ancienne

As of late, my focus has been baking, particularly artisan breads. I've been trying to test out a new type of bread each time. Typically my bread recipes either come from the internet, usually from King Arthur Flour or The Fresh Loaf. This weekend though, I reverted back to my first bread baking book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. I decided I wanted to try something new from the book, but something fairly simple that could pair with the balsamic braised chicken breasts I was making for dinner. I decided to try out the pain a l'ancienne that Peter raved about in the book.

Pain a l'ancienne is a very simple rustic bread made of only yeast, flour, water, and salt. It is also a very wet, sticky dough at a 80% hydration level, similar to ciabatta. The bread is unique in that you use ice water in it and then immediately refrigerate the dough after a light kneading. The bulk fermentation for the dough is done in the refrigerator for at least overnight, with the idea being that by retarding the fermentation, it will draw out flavors from the flour that otherwise would not arise from a conventional fermentation at room temperature. I went ahead and mixed it up Saturday morning, threw it in the fridge, and then pulled it out of the refrigerator Sunday morning. With a couple hours to warm up and then some simple shaping, the bread was ready for the oven. I chose a baguette shape as this seemed the simplest. Rather than the typical folded technique, I simply cut the dough with a bench scraper and then stretched it to length. The three baguettes then went into the 550 degree F oven onto the hot pizza stone. I then generated steam in the oven using my cheapo method of a cast iron skillet and ice cubes.

After about 20 minutes of baking, the bread came out quite nicely. It had a ton of oven spring and developed a nice crust. All's looking well from the outside.......

 After 10 minutes of cooling, it was time to see what the inside looked like. A recent rustic sourdough trial had resulted in a tight even crumb, which was not what was intended for that recipe or this one. Would it come out with huge uneven holes like a rustic very hydrated bread should??

Boom! There are the holes I was looking for. The taste though? Well, for a bread that only has 4 ingredients, it actually was pretty damn good. This bread is going on the staples list as it was easy, delicious, and cheap to make. The two things I will try differently the next time is to try to get a little more browning on the crust and also try to score the loaves, but I think that will prove difficult with this hydrated of a dough.

On a side note, here is a picture of the harvest pumpkin scones that were the dessert for dinner. I went with the diced crystallized ginger in this batch.