I recently tried some orange cranberry bread at my local grocery's bakery (Wegman's), which is being produced for the holiday season.  It was nice, but not exactly the direction I would have gone with it, and not something I wanted to eat a great deal of.  It was very orange-y, quite sweet, and topped with coarse sugar.  I began thinking about how I would do things differently and eventually put together this formula.  After a little trial and error, I'm very happy with this bread, so I thought I would share. 

The sweet potato and small amount of butter makes for a very soft, but still satisfyingly strong crumb, and the crust is medium, golden, and very pleasantly soft.  I'm a fan of hearty hearth breads with crust edging on charred and bursting with seeds, so this is a nice change from the norm for me.  The cranberries are ideal for me at 30%, and walnuts are present but not so abundant as to weight down the loaf or overpowering the orange and sweet potato.  I'm very pleased with how this most recent version is balanced.  It's delicious on it's own, with butter or cream cheese, toasted with jam (nothing too sweet), or soaking up the yolks of over-easy eggs, my personal favorite.

I'd like to hear any feedback or suggestions for this bread, if anyone has thoughts.  Formula and instructions are below. 

Thanks!

Logan

Biga

                                        %         Weight

Bread Flour                        50         50g
Whole Wheat Flour             50         50g
Instant Yeast                     0.5        0.5g (1/8 tsp for me)
Water                                70         70g

- Mix ingredients and ferment covered at room temperature about 3 hours, then refrigerate overnight. I have held the biga for this bread up to about 3 days with no problems. Remove from fridge an hour or two before mixing the final dough to get rid of the chill. Or, just adjust your water temperature to counteract the cool biga (I prefer just to let it warm up on it's own).

Final Dough

                                          %         Weight

Biga                                    50        170g
Bread Flour                          100       340g
Water                                  54        184g
Sweet Potatoes                     43        146g
Unsalted Butter                     4          14g
Salt                                     2.1        7g
Instant Yeast                        1          3.4g (just shy of a teaspoon for me)
Sweetened Dried Cranberries  30         102
Walnuts, toasted                   20         64
Zest of 1 orange

- Peel and boil the sweet potato until soft, then drain and mash. Mix the butter in while mashing, and allow the mixture to cool completely. Combine flour, biga (chop into small pieces first for easier mixing), water, yeast, salt, orange zest, and the sweet potato/butter mixture and mix to form a fairly shaggy dough. I like to mix the water and orange zest into the sweet potato/butter mixture, and then add that mixture to the dry ingredients and biga. Works well, but I don't believe it matters much.

NOTE: if your oranges are not the best or you want more orange in the bread, substitute some or all of the water out for orange juice. I used about a third orange juice and two thirds water with my last batch and it was ideal. I suspect when the good florida oranges come into season this won't be necessary, but I'll have to wait and see.

- Knead until very smooth and somewhat elastic. I used a KA mixer with a dough hook set around 3 for 10-12 minutes. Then add the cranberries and walnuts and mix at low speed or incorporate by hand. My mixer is reluctant to distribute these, so I knead by hand for the last few minutes.

- Ferment until roughly doubled, 2-3 hours is typical for me.

- Divide and shape the dough. This is enough for two smallish boules, a shade over 500g each. Rolls would also be nice, and I thought I might try a braid next time.

- Proof about 45-90 minutes, until slightly pillowy and roughly doubled (careful of overproofing though, this dough is quite soft and when I first started tinkering with it I had a couple runaway proofing experiences). I proof boules freestanding on parchment directly on a sheet pan, covered loosely with plastic wrap or produce bags.

- Preheat the oven to 400, no steam or stone is necessary.  Also, this bread does not benefit from scoring.

- Bake the loaves on a sheet pan for 20 minutes at 400, and then rotate the pan if your oven requires it. Bake for an additional 10-20 minutes, I usually count on 12-14 in my oven. I pull them when they're nice and golden all over, sound hollow, and reach at least 190 in the center. These times are just for boules, so if you makes rolls or another shape, you'll want to adjust accordingly.

- Boules should cool for about an hour, but after that I like them best at their very freshest. This will keep in plastic bags quite well for about 2 days, and if any lasts past then it would be good for toasting.

The Results:

My slicing wasn't perfect, but you get the idea.

For a little scale.

My ideal breakfast.

I don't usually make breads, other than foccacia and pizza, that are flavored with with fruits, vegetables, nuts, cheeses, and/or meats. simply happy with the flavors imparted by well-ripened flours, yeast or SD starter, water and salt mixtures. But, reading a TFL post regarding purchasing a sourdough bakery in Oregon, and the experiments the new owner/baker indulges, when he suggested he might try a walnut-blue cheese loaf I started salivating. I had to try it on my own.

Here's my recipe:

Ingredients

Sourdough Starter (100% Hydration) 8.5 oz

Rye Flour  3.0 oz.

All Purpose Flour 8.5 oz.

Bread Flour 17 oz.

Water (including starter's 4.25 oz contribution contribution) 22.0 oz.

Salt 3 tsp.

Gorgonzola (or blue-cheese) 3/4 cup, crumbled

Walnuts 3/4 cup coarsely chopped

Here's what I did with them.

Mixed 4.25 oz. (1 cup) AP flour and 1/2 cup (4 oz.) water with the SD starter, cover and set aside for 12 hours. At -6 hours, mixed the Rye flour with the starter, recovered, and set aside for the remaining six hours. Combined all remaining flour and salt and whisked to distribute. Mixed with remaining liquid, and combined, by hand, until dough began forming. Note: I originally, calculated flour and water for about a 67% hydration, but at that rate, the dough was, and remained after ten minutes of hand stretching and folding too sticky to be manageable. I gradually added one more cup of bread flour (included in the above intgredients) while continuing to work the dough. (This calculates to a 60% hydration.) Once reasonably manageable, I streched the dough into a rectangle and sprinkled it with 1/3 each of the walnuts and gorgonzola crumbles. I tri-folded the dough, and stretched and folded it once again. I repeated this two more times incorporating the rest of the walnuts and cheese. I still had a very slack, slightly sticky dough. (probably the Rye flour's influence. I'm still learning how Rye flour behaves.) I first proofed in a oiled bowl (approx. 2 hours.), pre shaped, rested, shaped, and proofed again until dough doubled (It also flattened and spread).Slashed and baked thirty minutes in a 450°F oven with steam for the first ten minutes. Internal temperature reached 208°F. Got good oven spring, would have liked more. Flavor is excellent, crust and crumb are typical sourdough chewy. The cheese melted completely and infused its flavor, subtly,  throughout the dough; the walnuts create little bursts of flavor when you bite into them.

When I do it again (and I will) I'll make a couple minor adjustments. I'll toast the walnuts beforehand (intended to, but forgot: a senior moment). Make the starter wetter during the twelve hour preferment developement time. This should favor greater yeast development, resulting eventually in more oven spring.

This weekend's bake, per my wife's request, was a walnut stout bread.  The recipe that I used (note that all measurements are volumes, not weights) can be found here: http://www.kitchenlink.com/mf/2/4133.  We first saw it printed in the Kansas City Star some years ago; the link attributes it to the Houston Chronicle.  It's probably one of those recipes that was reprinted widely, since it is so good.  Oh, and don't miss the Cheddar-Ale spread recipe at the bottom of the page.  It is wonderful with this bread!

There are a couple of insights that I can offer, having made this bread on several occasions.  It is essentially a rye bread, which means that the crumb is very smooth and somewhat dense.  The dough will be sticky as you handle it.  The recipe suggests adding flour during kneading to control the stickiness but I elected to knead with one hand and clean the countertop (and my hand) with a plastic dough scraper.  It helps to keep the finished bread from being too dry.  The recipe merely says "rye flour".  I don't know if it means white rye, medium rye, or whole rye.  In my case, whole rye flour was on hand, so that is what I used and it turned out fine.  The recipe also requires 1 Tablespoon of coriander, and that is not a misprint.  Between the coriander and the anise seed, it is a very fragrant bread.  As for the stout, I've used Guinness on previous occasions with good results.  This time, I used Boulevard Brewery's Dry Stout (local to Kansas City) with equally delicious results.  I think you could get away with using any dark beer or ale, whether stout, porter, bock or dunkel.  The flavor may shift a bit, but it wouldn't upset the overall results.  Obviously, the richer the flavor of the beer or ale, the richer the flavor of the bread.  The walnuts are, to my tastes, essential for the bread.  They contribute both flavor and a crunch that play off the other flavors and textures very nicely. 

The recommended baking time is 35-45 minutes at 375F.  I checked a loaf's temperature at the 40-minute mark and it was only about 180F, so I left it in for another 10 minutes.  If it had been taken out at the recommended time, it would have been gummy.  Since I only make this every two or three years, I haven't really experimented with different temperature/time combinations.

Here is a picture of the finished loaves:

Paul

My sweet bread-loving best friend suffered a heart attack last year, and since then I've been searching for and experimenting with lower-fat, healthy versions of his favourite recipes.  This incredibly easy moist, delicious loaf, adapted from Bonnie Stern's Best of HeartSmart Cooking is not only lower in fat, but what fat it contains is mono or polyunsaturated, which boosts HDL (good) cholesterol. 

I am making a modified verison of Pearl's Walnut Levain from Maggie Glezer's book. The walnuts are turning the bread purple. I've tried toasting them, but that doesn't help. I'm thinking of toasting them and tossing them in flour and then adding them to the recipe. Any ideas?