September 9, 2011 - 9:28am
Fruit Juice PH vs. Yeast?
I am in the proces of making some Cinnamin/Cranberry bread when my little niece asks if I used Cranberry juice. I never thought of it. Could you use the natural juice since it has natural sugars, to the Poolish? Or would the acid in the fruit affect the rise? Since I can't seem to find anything upon using juices I am assuming there would be a problem.
Anyone know? I can always experiment later.
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I would defintely give it a shot. The acidity in fruit may be an issue, but, when watered down in a juice should be OK.
BTW: here's a table of various fruits and their PH.... Cranberries are not listed.
Maybe there's a reason cranberry juice isn't on the list above...
My daughter loves the "cranberry juice" you can buy readily in the supermarket. Made me look closely at the "ingredients" part of the label. It's basically flavored sugar water. (That's not necessarily bad, but it's something to be aware of.) My guess is the typical "cranberry juice" would work fine in bread, would make it fairly sweet and give it some color. If there's other sweetener (sugar, honey, etc.) in the recipe though, it might be best to leave it out so the net result isn't too sweet.
I got a jar of real cranberry juice (crush the cranberries, bottle what comes out exactly as is) in a health food store one time. We used it for medication (curing urinary tract infections), as it was so "tart" sipping it wasn't very pleasant.
For cranberry flavor when baking I usually use "craisins" (cranberry "raisins", get it?-): heavily sugared and partially dehydrated cranberries. They're nice to bite into, give the bread interesting flavor and interesting appearance, and keep the sweetness localized to just the bits of fruit rather than throughout the whole crumb. My supermarket is awash in small sacks and containers of them - yours probably is too (but they're small, so you don't notice them until you start looking). I often combine the craisins with something like bits of walnuts.