Cranberry-walnut sourdough is delicious (and other lessons learned)

I've been making lots of sourdough lately. My favorite had dried cranberries and toasted walnuts.

Cranberry walnut sourdough #2

Rather than dwelling on individual loaves, this post summarizes what's worked and what hasn't lately. As usual, the sourdough is based on Josey Baker's recipes.

How much fruit & nuts?

When I make a loaf that's just walnuts, I usually use 1 cup (or more) of toasted walnuts. When the loaf is fruit and nuts, I use 3/4 cup of toasted nuts and 1/2 cup of dried fruit.

To soak or not to soak?

If you have great dried fruit, I don't think you need to soak it. If you do soak, 20 minutes in hot water seems sufficient, but be sure to drain the fruit really well.

I didn't soak the cranberries the first time I made cranberry-walnut bread, and the bread was still delicious. A big part of their deliciousness was that the cranberries were great. I think I got them at Berkeley Bowl.

Interior of cranberry-walnut loaf #1

The second time I made cranberry-walnut bread, I used cranberries from Trader Joe's. They were fine but not great, so I didn't love the bread quite as much. I soaked them and should have drained them for longer, but the end result was still a very nice bread. You can see from the pictures that the cranberries in loaf #1 were larger and more deeply colored. They just had a lot more flavor than those in loaf #2.

Interior of cranberry-walnut loaf #2

In a raisin-pecan loaf that I made, I soaked and drained the raisins, both for longer than I did the cranberries. That worked out well, but I don't think you need to soak the fruit for that long.

When to add the fruit & nuts

I used to add walnuts just after mixing in the flour. That's probably the easiest way to go, but the dough is discolored by the walnuts: near the walnuts, the dough is purplish, as you can see in my other posts about walnut sourdoughs.

Another option I tried is adding the walnuts and fruit during shaping. This worked OK, but the distribution wasn't very good, and you have no possibility of reshaping if you mess it up.

Take my raisin-pecan sourdough. I spread its dough out flat, then spread out the soaked raisins and toasted pecans, and then rolled it all up. But the dough had no surface tension, so I ended up folding it into thirds to make it a little more likely rise and get a nice ear. 

Raisin-pecan sourdough

As you can see from the picture above, the shape is a little odd, but I did get that ear. Unfortunately, it was along one of the seams (at the top of the picture), not where I diagonally scored the bread. Also, raisins peeked out of the scores. Not a good look.

Inside the raisin-pecan sourdough

The distribution of raisins and nuts was uneven, but not as bad as I feared.

With both cranberry-walnut sourdoughs, I mixed in the fruit and nuts after my last fold-and-stretch knead. This wasn't as hard as I feared.

The winner: cranberry-walnut sourdough #1

The loaf had no ear (my boules never do), but the bread was delicious, with the mixins well distributed throughout.

Delayed baking and flying roofs

I often don't bake the bread the same day that I start it. Instead, I let it rise in the refrigerator, so I can bake it when I need it, and the bread can gain depth of flavor. In my house, we like sourdough.

For my last couple of batches, I created enough dough for two loaves. One loaf I shape immediately (to either bake right away or put in the fridge for a day or two), and the other I put in the fridge, unshaped. The next day I'll shape the second loaf.

I recently was having lots of flying roofs—the top crust would separate from the bread below it. The cause seemed to be taking the shaped loaf out of the fridge before I was ready to put it in the oven. Once I changed to baking cold dough, right out of the fridge, the flying roofs went away.

Sesame sourdough looked good on the outside

The sesame sourdough was my most recent victim of a flying roof.

Flying roof (not as bad as some I've had)

Baking pans & form factor

For boules, I use either the bare cooking stone with a large, squat stock pot on top or (more recently) a huge dutch oven.

Large, squat stock pot

The dutch oven is a little scarier, but it worked out really well when I somehow used a cloth to maneuver the dough into it, as opposed to when I used a parchment paper sling. (The parchment paper made the loaf's edges wavy and was hard to remove, since it got brittle.) I need to try the dutch oven again.

Huge dutch oven

For longer loaves, I used to use the same stone + stock pot combo as for a boule, but sometimes I'd misposition the pot, and the edge of the loaf would be a little weirdly shaped. Last time, I used my long, low, 5-quart Le Creuset pan. I was afraid it wasn't tall enough, but it worked out great.

5 quart Le Creuset worked great for a longer loaf

For really long loaves, I use the King Arthur covered baker. It's a handy form factor, but the crust isn't as nice. I baked my most recent plain sourdough in the covered baker, so it'd be easier to share with my parents.

Just before going into the oven.
This dough was a bit wet and overproofed;
slashing did not go well.

The crust looks nice, but I don't like it as much

Inside the end piece

Two seedy sourdoughs

Last week I made a couple of sourdoughs, one with pumpkin seeds added during shaping, and one with sunflower seeds added at the beginning. Both were, as usual, based on Josey Baker's sourdough recipe.

Sunflower seed sourdough

The first loaf had an amazing crust, which I attribute either to cooking it in a dutch oven or cooking it almost too much. Perhaps both. The second loaf had a good crust, but it wasn't as crunchy-chewy as the first.

With the first sourdough, I had enough time to let the dough rise slowly, although (sadly) I didn't keep the details. I think the first rise was about 24 hours, mostly in the fridge.

After the first rise, I shaped the bread and added pumpkin seeds. (They might have been roasted, but they weren't salted, and I didn't soak them.) I pushed the dough into a flat rectangle, then spread a layer of pumpkin seeds on top, and then sort of folded it a few times.

This way of adding the seeds had worked before, with the walnuts, but it didn't work as well for the pumpkin seeds. They ended up clumped. It'd probably be better to mix the seeds into the dough at the beginning.

After shaping

I don't recall how long the shaped dough was in the fridge, but I did take it out for a final rise at room temperature. I forgot to set an alarm, so the dough rose a little too long. Oops.

After rising perhaps a bit too much

I put the bottom of a dutch oven in the oven, on top of a baking stone, and heated the oven to 500 degrees for 30+ minutes. Then I flipped the dough onto some parchment, and gently laid the parchment in the dutch oven, added a lid, and turned the oven down to 475. As usual, I removed the lid after 20 minutes and cooked the bread for another 15+ minutes.

For some reason, this time the parchment paper folded in such a way that the bread had little protuberances around the bottom.

Parchment paper induced bulbs at the top and bottom right

I cooked the heck out of this bread. It looked almost burnt, but it was really really tasty.

Well done

If you look closely at the interior, you can see clumps of pumpkin seeds.

The sunflower seed dough was a different beast entirely. I started the night before, toasting and then soaking the sunflower seeds (~ 1 cup), but I didn't have time to put the dough in the fridge. I just made the dough, and then kept it out until it was ready to shape.

Shaped dough

Ready to go into the oven

I baked this loaf directly on the stone (with a pot on top for the first 20 minutes), but I think the dutch oven produced a better crust.

Cooling

I like how this bread had sunflower seeds everywhere.

It looks like the crust separated a little bit, but I only noticed that in one spot.

Oat-applesauce muffins and a walnut sourdough

This weekend I made muffins and, for the first time in a while, sourdough.

Muffins

These "healthy oats and applesauce muffins" feature applesauce, whole wheat flour, and lots of oats. They're similar to a bunch of recipes, but they use whole eggs instead of egg white, and butter or coconut oil instead of a boring oil or margarine. The recipe also doesn't come with a topping.

I used butter and substituted brown sugar for the white sugar. I also added about 1/2 cup cinnamon chips, just because I could, and a pinch of salt.

I thought about adding a topping, but decided against it. I also considered adding raisins, but abandoned them in favor of the cinnamon chips.

Before going into the oven

I cooked the muffins (11, not the claimed dozen) on 375 on the convection setting for 12-15 minutes. (Someone ignored the alarm!) Although the toothpick came out clean, the muffins didn't look done. Still, the timing (whatever it was) was perfect. The texture was nice and moist, but definitely cooked through. The muffins didn't rise much, if at all; I'm not sure if that's because of my faux baking soda & powder, or just how the recipe works.

The muffins tasted pretty good, but not amazing—they were much what you'd expect from a cinnamony, completely whole grain muffin recipe. If I make it again, and I might, I'll try whole wheat pastry flour instead of regular whole wheat flour. I'll probably use raisins or cranberries instead of cinnamon chips.

About the cinnamon chips: I haven't yet found anything I love them in. If they were bigger, I might like them better, but they just kind of get lost in everything I've tried, so far. I wonder if they'd be good added on top of an iced muffin—say, a carrot cake muffin.

Walnut sourdough

I hadn't made bread outside the bread machine in a while, so this loaf was way overdue. Unfortunately, I forgot to put the dough in the fridge before I went out for the evening, so the dough rose way too high!

It should be half this high!

When I got home and saw my mistake, I decided to go ahead and shape the bread. The bread was so gloopy it was rather hard to work. I ended up flattening it out, adding a bunch of walnuts on top, and then folding/rolling it a bunch of times to try to add a little surface tension.

Plopped into a banetton

The next morning, I took it out of the fridge and let it rise at room temperature (around 68 degrees, just like the night before) for a couple of hours . Then I put the dough back in the fridge while I went out for a couple of hours.

Before baking

When I got back, I preheated the oven to 500 degrees for 45 minutes, to get the baking stone nice and hot. I then turned the bread out onto a parchment-covered peel, which took some doing since the dough was sticky. I sliced the top, then slid the bread onto the stone in the oven, placed a big pot on top of it, and reduced the heat to 475.

The resulting bread was very flat—not surprising, given how overworked the yeast had been. Poor yeast.

However, the texture was fine, and it was deliciously sour! The crust, a couple of hours after baking, still had a great, chewy yet crunchy texture.

Flat, yet delicious

This bread tasted great by itself or with fresh mozzarella on top. It'd be great with olive oil or butter, as well.

I used the usual Josey Baker recipe, with added walnuts (maybe 3/4 cup, toasted).

Spent grain bread, sourdough onion rolls, cornbread, bread to go, and starting a starter

This past week, I made spent grain bread successfully, a relief after last time's weirdly low loaf. I also cooked a couple of great cornbreads, made sourdough onion buns again, brought bread on a family trip, and started making a starter.

Starter

Why do I need a third starter? I don't, so I converted my white starter (50-50, by volume). But why convert it? I'm beta testing an app, Bread Boss, which guides you through a variety of sourdough bread recipes. Now's the perfect time to test, since I'm staycationing the two final weeks of the year.

Spent grain bread

I used the same ingredients for my spent grain bread as last time (and almost the same as the time before). The only differences were in the prep:

• I put in the salt, olive oil, and honey first, with the water and spent grain.
• The spent grain was frozen, so I nuked it with the water until it was warm (but not as hot as last time).
• I took out the bread as soon as it was done.
• I didn't use the delay timer.

This loaf wasn't as tall as the first one, but it had great taste and texture. It was a bit lopsided, which is common when baking in the bread machine, but hadn't happened the two times before.

The outside

This recipe, especially with the spent grain from North English brown ale, is a winner.

The inside

Cornbreads

I used The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook recipe for Southern Skillet Bread (p. 496), and the results were so good I made the cornbread again just a few days later. Here's what was different from the recipe:

• Instead of 3/4 cup buttermilk, use 3T buttermilk powder and 3/4 cup water.
• Instead of bacon drippings, use 2t roasted peanut oil and 2t vegetable oil (safflower, I think).
• The usual sodium reduction measures:
• No salt
• Sodium free baking powder and baking soda

I'd used all peanut oil before, which I rather liked, but it seemed to taste too peanutty for our guests. Half the amount seemed perfect.

I used Quaker Oats yellow cornmeal, which worked just fine. Before I'd used Bob's Red Mill medium grind cornmeal, which I liked, but sometimes it had hard bits of grain that would hurt my teeth. If I happen to find Bob's fine grind, I'll try that.

This bread tasted fine the next day, but it had lost its wonderful crunch. Also, it's best warm.

Sourdough onion rolls

I've made these before, with success, but it's been a long time since I made any sourdough bread, so it felt new.

We had only one, smallish onion, so I chopped it, cooked it, and put all of it (2/3-3/4 cup) into the dough. I added it during the final stretch-and-fold, which turned into a dough mangling session.

I wanted to bake the rolls the next day, so I immediately put the dough in the refrigerator.

Dough, the next morning

The next day I took it out, let it warm up (partly in the oven on proof mode), and divided it into 8 parts. I shaped 6 buns and left the other 2 until later.

6 buns ready to rise

I cooked a little more onion and put it on top of a couple of buns, but I think the bread without the onion topping was just as good.

The buns at the bottom left have additional onion on top.
These buns probably would higher if my niece didn't pat them.

I cooked the buns at 450 degrees for 20 minutes with a cover over the pan, and then about 15 more minutes uncovered.

After cooking

These buns are amazing within the first hour or two out of the oven, when the onions are warm and the crust is still crunchy. After a few hours, they're probably best toasted, to bring out the onion flavor and make the crust crisper.

The next day I took the remaining two roll portions and shaped them into balls. After letting them rise a bit, I cooked them at 475, covered, for 15 minutes, and then uncovered for about 15 more minutes.

Mini boule

Bread to go

So I'd have food to eat with 10 of my closest family members, I baked a couple of loaves of bread: Bohemian black bread (BBB) and spent grain bread.

The BBB was much better looking than last time, thanks to using black cocoa.

Dark and out of focus, just the way I like it

The spent grain bread was the same recipe I made the last couple of times. I checked the dough a few minutes into its first rise and noticed that it was very soft and was almost non-existent on the left side of the bread pan. I picked the dough up, as best as I could, and put it back down in a more symmetric shape.

It worked! The loaf was high and symmetric.

Spent grain bread

For future reference, here's the ingredient list, in pan-addition order:

• Scant 1 cup water, mixed (and, if the grain is cold or tough, microwaved 2 minutes) with 3/4 cup spent grain, firmly packed
• 2 T olive oil
• 2 T honey
• 3/4 t salt
• 2-1/4 c bread flour
• 3/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1 t bread machine yeast

It's best to check the dough's shape when it begins rising, so you can fix the shaping (making it symmetric) if necessary.

Spelt bread and spent grain bread

Last weekend I made spelt bread, to meh results. I'm considering making spent grain bread, but haven't found the time/recipe/nerve yet.

The spelt bread was from Hensperger (p. 128) in the 1.5# size (as usual) with the following modifications:

• buttermilk powder + water instead of buttermilk (didn't have buttermilk)
• ghee instead of whipped reduced-fat margarine (didn't have margarine)
• 1T gluten instead of 1T + 1t (oops)
• half the yeast, half the salt (as usual)

The recipe says to set the crust on dark, but the Zo doesn't let me do that for the whole-wheat cycle. I could create a custom cycle, but I probably won't.

The resulting bread was tasty but dry, so it was best as toast. I'm sure it would've been moister if I'd taken it out as soon as it was baked, and not cut into it while it was warm. But still. The first slice of this bread was crisp like a cracker!

The inside was dry.

It was also misshapen.

The outside was lumpy.

And it had weird formations on the surface.

The outside was even worse in closeup

Still, I might make this bread again. I'll be sure not to leave it in the machine after it's baked, I might add some more liquid (maybe using real buttermilk), and I'll probably try a different fat.

One Degree organic sprouted spelt flour (now in the freezer)

My husband brewed some hefeweizen beer last weekend, and the spent grain smells wonderful. I've got to use it in some bread, perhaps with barley malt syrup as a sweetener.

The following recipes sound interesting to me. Most of them have at least 1 cup of spent grain, and I avoided breads with egg because they just sounded wrong.

• gameofbrews.com/basic-spent-grain-bread
  Looks like a good recipe, but it calls for drying the spent grain, which I won't bother to do. I'd probably cut the water to 3/4 cup instead, and add more if it seemed to need it. I might use 2 T malt syrup instead of 1 T honey.
• honey.com/recipes/detail/6/honey-spent-grain-beer-bread
  I'd cut this recipe by 1/2 or 2/3 and probably use malt syrup instead of honey (sorry, honey.com).
• food.com/recipe/spent-grain-beer-bread-417899
  Interesting recipe with 3 cups of spent grain, 3-5 cups flour, lots of sugar, and almost no salt.
• snappyservicecafe.com/homebrewed-to-home-baked-spent-grain-bread
  3 cups bread/AP flour, 1 cup WW flour, 1 cup spent grain.
• sourdough recipes:
• theperfectloaf.com/natural-sourdough-with-spent-beer-grains
• bakersandbest.com/2015/03/02/spent-grain-sourdough
• noteatingoutinny.com/2010/04/13/sourdough-spent-grain-rye-bread
• thefreshloaf.com/node/36040/beer-bread-spent-grains

Also, I need to check out Spent Grain Chef, a bunch of recipes from Brooklyn Brew Shop that feature spent grain (in granola! brownies! burger buns! corn sticks! and more!). I happen to have a mini corn pan, so I might need to make those corn sticks.

Dutch oven walnut (no-knead) sourdough, poppy-sesame seed sourdough, and a failed cornbread

In which I bake good and meh sourdoughs from the same batch, cook a practically inedible cornbread, and consider no-knead bread...

Sourdough breads

Dutch oven loaf vs. baking stone loaf

I've often been disappointed in the height of my sourdough loaves, but I'm very happy with the walnut sourdough loaf I just baked in a Dutch oven. However, the Dutch oven wasn't the only difference between this and my usual sourdough:

• I never kneaded the dough, at all. Not even a stretch.
• After mixing the dough (sans walnuts), I put it in the refrigerator for 3.5 days. (I don't remember if I refrigerated it right away or waited a bit. I might have punched down the dough after a day or two.)
• I preheated the oven with a stone on a low shelf and the Dutch oven (but not its lid) on the middle shelf. (I put the lid on when the bread went in.)
• I preheated the oven at 500 degrees, meaning to turn it down to 475 right after adding the dough, but forgetting for a couple of minutes.
• I put the dough in the Dutch oven seam-side up (using a dishcloth to maneuver the loaf without getting close to the burning hot pot). I also tried to slash the loaf a bit, but that didn't take.

No walnuts in this piece... but it's still good

Also worth noting: the dough was exactly the same as the sesame-poppy seed dough. I'd made a double batch, immediately mixing soaked seeds into the other half. I baked the seeded loaf the day after mixing, using a baking stone and (as soon as I remembered) a big pot as a cover.

I've realized that I don't like poppy-sesame seed sourdough. I'm not sure whether that's because the recipe has way more seeds than the sesame seed bread I've loved in the past, or because I just don't like poppy seeds in sourdough. The bread was fine when toasted, but I won't be making it again.

Lots and lots of seeds in and on this loaf

Cornbread

I'd made this skillet cornbread successfully before, but this time it was gummy and pale, with weird bubbles. Yuck! I think I did two things wrong:

1. Preheated the skillet. It was supposed to go in the oven for a couple of minutes, but I left it in much longer. Although preheating is good for flour-water-salt kinds of bread, apparently it isn't for something that's more like a quick bread.
2. Maybe mixed it too much.

Better luck next time.

Notes on no-knead bread

One of these days I might try this recipe for no-knead dough (parens indicate my calculations for a couple of sizes I might try):

To 100 parts flour (375/150 g), add 1.5 parts salt (~5/2 g) and 1 part (~4/1.5 g) instant yeast. Whisk those together. Add 70 parts (~262/105 g) water, and stir to combine. Cover, then let rise overnight. Transfer to the fridge, let ferment for three days, then turn dough out on to a well-floured surface. Shape dough, sprinkle with flour, and cover with a floured cloth. Let it rise for at least two hours and up to 4 at room temperature. Slash, then bake in a preheated 450°F Dutch Oven for 15 minutes with the lid on. Remove the lid, and continue baking until it hits around 209°F, 30 minutes or so. Let it cool.
From http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/06/the-food-lab-the-science-of-no-knead-dough.html

The ex-grow house, themed bread, and rolling in walnuts

Last weekend I baked two walnut sourdough loafs. The only interesting parts:

• The first loaf was themed.
• I didn't incorporate the walnuts into the dough of the second loaf, but instead rolled them up into the loaf at shaping time.

The first loaf was for a hey-it's-our-first-night-in-our-new-house-but-this-is-not-a-housewarming party. Some friends of ours just moved into a house that, a couple of years before, had been confiscated by the DEA. Naturally, at this party a grow-house theme kept coming up. Many of us took tours of the ex-grow space, which was now accessible only by walking down a steep hillside and going through small access panels in the side of the house.

I baked a boule and carved a perfectly respectable sunrise into it, knowing from experience that people would take this sunrise as a—gasp!—marijuana leaf.

People avoided cutting the sunrise symbol for as long as possible

Some of the party guests were a little worried about what was in the bread, but my straight-arrow reputation reassured them. Yes, I'm that boringrespectable.

The second loaf was more interesting, technically. I made my regular sourdough, but instead of mixing in the walnuts, I waited until shaping time. I pressed the dough thin, added the walnuts, and rolled it all up into a log that I plopped into a rectangular banneton.

The bubbliest part of the loaf

It worked out well, and I'll do it again.

Half a slice

My shaping can only improve. Here are pictures of the dough before and after the final rise.