I recently chanced upon an interesting recipe in the excellent Baecker Suepke's blog. [1]

It is for a Black Forest chocolate cherry sourdough bread. The Modernist Bread version springs to mind, but the Black Forest one is different - not sweet, apart from the cherries - and it has toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I also added some non-salted pistachio seed, which gave a rather nice contrasting green colour.

Interestingly, the recipe predates the Modernist Bread one by a couple of years. You can find the recipe HERE [2]. It's in German, but translates successfully. There's also a variant recipe here [3] which I didn't use, but it has a few different tweaks.

The recipe is quite complex, with a soaker, a levain and an "aroma cook piece" (Aroma Kochstück) and various grades of wheat and rye meals. I approximated these with my Mockmill. The recipe also calls for light rye flour T997. I made this by putting wholegrain rye through a #50 sieve.

Here's how the loaf looked after baking:

And here's the crumb:

The crumb and flavour remind me of a "pumpernickel on steroids". It really is bursting with flavour and I can recommend it to all who fancy an  interesting bake, albeit with some complexity.

My favourite pairing was with some good French brie; I shall be baking it again!

Lance