Gannat clabber bread

Wanting to salvage what I could from a failed attempt at making yogurt, and having some sourdough starter ready to go, I decided to use the milk in bread. Fortunately I checked my cookbook shelf and picked up The Breads of France, a fabulous volume I bought (and used occasionally) years ago, and I found a recipe for a bread made with clabbered milk. The bread is a specialty item dating from the sixteenth century in Gannat, a town in central France. The recipe looked interesting, so I thought I'd give it a try.

Clabbered milk is made by adding an activator to milk and keeping it warm until the mixture sort of congeals and looks somewhat like yogurt. My mixture hadn't fully clabbered, which is precisely why it was a failure as a yogurt, but although it seemed very runny, it did somewhat separate into curds and whey. The recipe ( for three two-pound loaves) called for two cups of clabber, for which 2 cups of whipped cottage cheese could be substituted. I used about three cups of the milk mixture, after being able to pour off (and reserve for other use later) about a cup of whey. I added the milk mixture to the 4 cups of starter that I had previously made and mixed in a bit of flour to encourage the yeast growth. It smelled more milky than yeasty, but a couple of hours later it had a nice fruity taste, which was a good sign, but no bubbles, which was a bad sign. I decided to leave it overnight to see what happened. The next morning there was still no obvious yeast activity, and I was concerned that the milk bacteria had done the little yeasties in, but I decided to go ahead and mix up the dough anyway. That was fairly reckless considering the recipe called for ten eggs. The dough worked up nicely, but I had might doubts it would rise. I was anxious to find out so I warmed the oven and used it to raise the dough. I needn't have worried; in three hours it was nearly overflowing the bowl. I didn't have time to bake the bread yesterday afternoon, so I punched it down and put it in the fridge to bake today.