Blog Note: On Friday I mentioned that I will be moving Bakers and Best off WordPress.com servers soon, and that folks who have subscribed via the WordPress.com reader would need to resubscribe another way. After doing some more digging with WordPress, turns out they will be able to help me with that! So, the site will look different but you’ll remain subscribed all the same. If you don’t see a Photoshop Phriday post in your reader at the end of this week, it means I somehow managed to mangle the transition, but am working to fix it! Back-end web development has been like trying to learn a foreign language in another language I don’t speak.

I’ve written a great deal about recipes that I put off for long periods of time, but this one has to take the cake. When I got Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice in the spring of 2011 I put a sticky note on the pain de campagne recipe. And here we are four years later, me finally having made this bread. I’ve done plenty of other things in that time, including start this blog! Yesterday marked 3 years since I started up my little corner of the internet.

Pain de campagne is your very basic french country bread. If you don’t speak French this should help with learning how to properly pronounce the name. I have a very rudimentary understanding of French pronunciation rules and constantly have my wife, who speaks French, correcting me. My first instinct is to say something that sounds like ‘panda campaign’ (save the pandas!) but that is horrifyingly wrong. Good news is, you don’t need to be able to say the name to make and enjoy the recipe. I already proved that when making Pääsiäisleipä a few weeks ago.

Continue reading →