Sweet Potato Walnut Pecan Einkorn Sourdough
I’ve been looking for purple sweet potatoes to make an interesting bread for months without any luck, so I finally decided I would try it with regular orange sweet potatoes. Yesterday after having roasted my sweet potato and with the levain build going I decided to go for a walk to Chinatown where I haven’t been recently. I went very early in the morning well before it gets busy at all. The first grocer I went to had a ton of purple sweet potatoes so I bough a few and next week I think I will use it for a sourdough bread.
I based this on FullProof Baking’s recipe that I saw on her Instagram feed.
10% whole einkorn
90% strong white flour
84% hydration
0.05% diastatic malt powder
Roast sweet potato mash and let cool 20%.
Roast walnuts and pecans and cool (I didn’t have enough of either so used both) 13%
100% hydration levain 20%
Autolyze for 2 hours
Add levain then 30 mins later add salt 2%
split dough into two equal halves, add sweet potato to one half and incorporate via slap and fold.
30 mins later laminate the two dough together with the sweet potato dough on top. Add nuts during lamination
Bulk fermentation 6 hours at 76ºF with 4 sets of coil folds.
Final shape and into banneton left at room temperature for 20 mins and the retard in fridge overnight.
Preheat oven 500ºF with Dutch oven inside. Bake in 450ºF oven in covered Dutch oven 20 mins.
Remove cover and bake at 420ºF for 10 mins.
Replace cover leaving gaps and continue to bake for 15 mins.
I didn’t get the oven spring I was hoping for with a few reasons I believe. I think that the hydration was too high for my skills so I wasn’t able to shape the dough tight enough. The sweet potato and nuts also weight down the dough and also interfere a bit with oven spring possibly, but on the other hand Kirsten certainly doesn’t have that issue with this dough.
Crumb shots to be posted later when bread is cut. It does smell lovely with a hint of the sweet potato.
Comments
The crumb is a bit closed in places, help me figure out what I can do to improve on this, it does taste good. The crumb is slightly wet and closed. I think it probably needed another 5 mins of bake time. I also think I should reduce the hydration maybe by 5% next time when I try this again. Do you think it is somewhat under or over proofed?
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I love the idea of sweet potatoes and nuts. Must taste great. Reminds me of Thanksgiving!
The crumb looks really open to me. You think it's too tight?
Thanks Ilene, something just seems a bit off with the crumb I’m not sure about. The combo of the sweet potatoes and nuts is really tasty though, I will try again this week.
Benny
Add-ins like nuts tend to result in a tighter crumb from my experience, but I'm sure you knew that. I wouldn't be surprised if the sweet potato creates a moister crumb, like a porridge bread? I've done squash bread a few times, but it's been awhile and the squssh was always roasted first to reduce water content.
The original recipe called for steamed sweet potatoes so I thought that roasting them would reduce their water content. Then I reduced the hydration but maybe I need to reduce a bit more. Perhaps you’re right I haven’t baked a bread with any add ins in quite some time so I’ve forgotten how much the nuts affect the crumb Ilene.
A tad under-proofed maybe. Large holes with an elongated shape are associated with that sometimes. I can't be sure though. You and Kirsten are working with different flour, different water, different sweet potatoes (of varying water content) and different environmental variables. Naturally, you two would obtain dissimilar results. For sure you are well-aware of this :)
Although purple sweet potato may be more eye-opening, regular orange sweet potato definitely tastes superior in my opinion. Just sweeter, moister and brighter in color! Shifting gears a little bit, with the sugar from the tubers and amylase from the einkorn, you probably don't need the diastatic malt.
Thanks for the comments Elsie, everything is appreciated. You’re right with the extra sugar from the sweet potatoes I probably didn’t need to add the diastatic malt powder. The bread flour I used to buy had amylase added to it so I thought that maybe this would help more my fermentation along if I added some diastatic malt. For some reason I though, maybe incorrectly, that Kirsten was using a malted flour for her breads so that was the other reason I added the diastatic malt.
I’ve never eaten the purple sweet potatoes so it should be interesting to see how they affect the bread and the flavour, I also liked the idea of baking a bread with a purplish crumb.
Benny