Pain Au Vin

A girl at work lent me this cookbook which is something I totally hate because I always end up wanting to keep it and then end up buying myself a copy. I seriously need to go on one of those TV shows all about curbing the ol' impulse purchasing and saving up for retirement. I kept this book for waaaay too long because there was a particularly tempting recipe at the back for Pain Au Vin which requires you to produce your own sourdough 'starter' and that takes around a week. I used this method, http://www.io.com/~sjohn/sour.htm
which suggest that you grow this stinky bacteria as a kind of pet in your fridge! (join me in saying eeeeeew to that metaphor)
You basically mix together a cup of flour and one of water in a clean jar, add a little of the mixture to it every day to 'feed it' until it grows into a beautiful, bubbling blob of fungus. Yum.
The book is written by a blogger, and like Lebovitz, she's continued with the blog and is dating some guy who won a James Beard Award a couple of days ago... so yeah, food.
She suggests using a blend of flours so I've got Strong White Bread Flour, Wholemeal Flour and some Buckwheat Flour I bought on a gluten free kick.
This recipe is really easy, just mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and leave covered for 12 hours, it will be really runny but you're meant to scoop it out, fold it somehow on a floured board and leave for another two hours under a tea towel to rise some more. Looks like this. I saw this photo and immediately thought of blob fish, mmmm blob fish...

You finally bake the dough in a hot, covered pan, in a very hot oven for almost an hour. I don't have any very good bread experiences, it's always too tough and brittle, burnt and tasteless - so imagine my surprise when I saw this.
Result: It rose quite well, but I was a little put off by the slightly hard, dark crust. And then I cut in to it and took a bite. It's amazing! So light and fluffy, with a good chewy crust. As soon as I tasted it I wanted it make more, and the next one was even better! I couldn't really taste the wine in the first loaf, so used water for the second one, and added more buckwheat which gave a a wholesome nutty taste.
I'm not much of a bread eater, but this was gone in one day, it's that good. And easy, basically 410g of mixed flour, 250ml liquid, 250g starter, a tablespoon of honey and a pinch of salt. Leave to rise for 12 hours, fold, cover, rise for another 2 and bake in a 220c pre-heated oven, covered for the first half an hour and uncovered for the next last 10 minutes. Do it now.