30% Rye Sourdough cream loaf - effect of cream and egg

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

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Being slightly lactose intolerant, I usually drink soy milk and don't have fresh milk stocked. However, I do often make desserts with cream, so there's always a carton of heavy whipping cream in my fridge (BTW, I highly recommend the 40% Darigold Heavy Cream from Costco, insanely rich).

I have been trying to make a soft 30% rye breads with cream as the only liquid for a while now. Starting from previous similar recipes such as this one, I simply replaced milk with more cream and adjusted ratio to get the same dough consistency. While buns with such method have turned out great, sandwich loaves usually lack volume. Even when I knead the dough to perfection and watch the proofing process very closely, the loaves either don't rise as high as expected or collapse/tear during the final stage of proofing or baking. It seemed that the dough lacked support and structure. Remembering my previous experiences with such soft sandwich loaves, I increased the ratio of eggs in the recipe and that made a big difference. The sandwich loaf turned out to be very tall, and kept shape well throughout.

30% Rye Sourdough Cream Loaf with Arugula
Note: 15% of the flour is in levain
Note: total flour is 280g, fit my Chinese small-ish pullman pan. For 8X4 US loaf tin, I suggest to use about 300g of total flour. For KAF 13X4X4 pullman pan, I would suggest using about 480g of total flour.

- levain
rye starter (100%), 6g
water, 25g
medium rye flour, 36g

1. Mix and let fermentation at room temp (73F) for 12 hours.

- final dough
bread flour, 196g (I used half KAF bread flour)
medium rye, 42g
sugar, 20g
heavy cream, 202g
salt, 6g
egg, 70g

1. Mix everything until stage 3 of windowpane (-30sec), see this post for details.
2. Rise at room temp for 2 hours, punch down, put in fridge overnight.
3. Takeout, divide, round, rest for 1 hour. shape as instructed here for sandwich loaf.
4. rise at room temp for about 5-6 hours. For my pullman pan, it should be about 80% full; for US 8x4inch pan, it should be about one inch above the edge. The dough would have tripled by then, if it can't, your kneading is not enough or over.

5. bake at 375F for 20min, then 350 for 25min.

Tall and proud, even after cooling

Incredibly shreddy soft, cream made the loaf richer, but not overwhelmingly.

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For the rest of the heavy that's about to expire, I made butter+buttermilk out of it!

Who knew it's so easy, recipe can be found here.

Then made this very summery peach cobbler scone using the homemade buttermilk/butter.

Recipe can be found here