Myhrvold chocolate-cherry sourdough
It was from a $600 cookbook. It was featured in the New York Times. Sounded good. Didn't work out as planned.
Of course, after I plunged into the recipe, I discovered that I should have read it first. I was hobbled by an aging oven and lack of equipment. Oven's top element shorted out and oven is too old to get a replacement. Oven does not go over 360 F. Recipe wanted 500 F. Recipe wanted a banneton; don't have. Recipe wanted me to bake in a dutch oven; I have one, but only one, and I needed to make two loaves (one for home, one to take to my zen center). So I improvised wildly and ended up with dense loaves that are so strongly chocolate (and coffee and sourdough) that I I do not like them.
It may also have been a mistake to use dark chocolate chocolate chips.
Recipe was an interesting combination of techniques: pannetone, retarding in refrigerator, baking in dutch oven a la no-knead bread. I think it might have worked if done exactly as required, but it certainly did not degrade gracefully.
But other people like the bread. A friend said the preponderance of dried cherries reminds him of fruitcake.
Would be interested to hear if other people succeeded with this recipe and how it turned out. I think it might have been intended to be chocolate panettone.
Here is a link to the recipe: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1018955-chocolate-cherry-sourdough-bread
Intriguing recipe-described as not savory but not sweet. Hmm...did it taste a bit bitter? I'm not so sure about this flavor profile. Chocolate-cherry and coffee (tho there is not much coffee) in a sourdough.
Was the book really $600???? Yikes!
I thought that the result was somewhat bitter. I do not drink coffee. My chocolate-fanatic coffee-swilling friend loved it.
very proud of his cookbooks.
Just a cursory Amazon search:
The NYT article states the recipe came from Modernist Bread, and at the time it was written they state that the list price was $625, so it's very believable that somebody somewhere was charging $600 for the books.
And I thought $75.00 was exorbitant for a PDF copy of The Taste of Bread
--Mike
I have books that are more expensive than $130 per volume.
It does not really look anything like panettone. It does, however, very much remind Nancy Silverton's chocolate cherry sourdough.
I think it might be interesting to make a filling of milk chocolate chips and chopped dried cherries and swirl it into a rich egg-milk-sugar-white flour dough made with instant yeast rather than sourdough.
I made a sourdough loaf without the dried cherries or chocolate chips. Instead, I used frozen dark cherries and cocoa and yes a little dark coffee, a little cardamon, and dark rye flour. Made a pleasing breakfast bread