Enriched true-sourdough trial #3: 85% hydration sweet potato cinnamon hearts with fermented cassava cream

I'm embarassed to admit it took 7 batches of trials just for cinnamon rolls lol. Don't get me wrong. Although I did some dough-related tweaks, it was designing the filling and topping that gave me headache.

And look at the cute shape! I almost changed the watermark to I-just-hit-puberty. by Jay 😆 lol

I love cinnamon rolls, but there are several things that I perceive as product flaws that I wanted to address (along with the tweaks):

• classic cinnamon roll dough is on the stiffer side. But that's not the bad thing. It's the sugary filling that sucks up water from the dough, making the buns chewy, which I feel non the appropriate texture for the product. I combat this by doing high hydration dough utilizing sweet potato puree
• speaking of weeping filling, I had this idea of preventing weeping filling by cooking the filling with starch. The lack of goo from this method is compensated by sticky cinnamon syrup glaze
• I'll say it out loud: I hate icing. Icing make baked goods taste cheap and look cheap. I sometimes wonder who would thought something like "Hey, you know what these sticky sugary buns need? More sugar of course!" I used pastry cream instead to enhance mouthfeel.

Okay let's get into it. These rolls are 4 components bake: sweet potato dough, tapé-singkong cinnamon filling, cinnamon glaze, and pandan scented tapé-singkong pastry cream. I did something new with the levain; it's salted levain. I wanted the dough to have no added sugar in it to avoid the end product being too sweet. So I messed around with salted levain. And since it was the filling and the topping that gave me most headache, I got the opportunity to really refine the fermentation schedule. It's like killing two pedophiles with one bullet.

In short, I love it! While the levain took long to mature, but the final proofing was really fast. And one thing I love the most about it, it has wider margin of error. I can let it sit for 2  hours after doubling, and will end up just fine. I can even do it overnight. It's a huge improvement from being constantly worry about it to just literally sleep over it. I'll do salted levain from now on.

I put the formula down here for a day, otherwise deleted.

And let's talk about filling! It's a starch thickened filling, alongside butter, cinnamon, palm sugar, pandan juice, and a very special ingredient; tapé singkong. It's fermented cassava root, fermented until sugary sweet and alcoholic. I believe it's a derivative of Chinese sweet rice, but with different starch. I like snacking on it, but using it raw on sweets or in bread dough can be very overwhelming. I'll talk about it more later.

Illustration, tapé singkong

And because the filling didn't weep, it means there is no goo. So I compensate the stickiness with sticky glaze made of palm sugar, cinnamon, pandan juice, butter, and water.

As for the topping, I tried making tapé singkong icing. Man, it was a slap on the face! Too intense and too sweet for my liking. So I opted for the more refined pastry cream, also with pandan leaves in it. I just planted a pandan offshoot, and have lots of pandan leaves in the freezer (my neighbor's pandan plant got too bushy, so she gifted some leaves to me).

I was thinking about making my own tapé, but it's ridiculously cheap, so I think it's best to just outsource it for the future to come.

Verdict

I'm happy. No leaking water, the stickiness is there, the tender buns, and the creaminess of the cream that follows after each bite... Man. It was worth the trouble. And the tapé singkong really came through without the intensity of alcohol associated with raw tapé. One thing that I feel the most important is the salted levain. I'll do it religiously from now on.

Next, I'll be revisiting some bake that has been on my bucket list! I've been looking forward for this, but no spoiler though!

Jay