Swirly bakes this weekend
I enjoy same day bakes but I think impatience got me on this chocolate+espresso + butter toasted oats swirl loaf (adapted recipe from bake-street.com) Guess I was just eager to see how the swirls turn out. ;) Still the entire process was rewarding, especially the smells from baking this (the extra espresso powder, butter toasted oats, yum)
The next swirly bake was a mix with discard, mashed potatoes, some strawberries.. This morning, I decided to find out the water content of the strawberries I have despite websites telling me they might be 85, 90, 92%.. I figured I’m gonna just use the purée instead of water for my dough. Two samples, 3 hours at 95°C later I got my readings and it’s 91.3%. So, I made the recipe: a potato+sd discard dough and a strawberry one. This is what came out of my little experiment. I figured my 5g lemon juice may not be enough to keep the brightness of the red or maybe the purée should’ve been reduced to 1/3 to concentrate the color OR I’ll just make strawberry powder instead.
That said, I must redo these two bakes.
Anyone here with experience keeping strawberry bright red enough in a bake before?
Comments
Well executed and well photographed, too.
Paul
Two of my favorite things to do :)
Well Cristi, wonderful swirls, and they both sound delicious. I haven’t baked with strawberries in bread before. Have you considered making a powder from freeze dried strawberries? I’ve been thinking of doing that for a new swirled sourdough milk bread but haven’t had luck finding the freeze dried fruit. Vit C might help the colour, it does for beets, you could crush a tablet and add a small amount of that to your dough.
Benny
I have thought about using ascorbic actually and having read an old post here, I was a lil unsure on how much of it to use (my scale only weighs at 0.1g accuracy). I did use 1 tsp fresh lemon juice but evidently that wasn’t enough.
Most probably, I’ll try again with berry powder (which I intend to make). So many experiments to do ;D
Not sure I’ll try freeze dried berries from Amazon though.
- Christi
Hi Benny, I tried drying them and finally when I was making some jam, I took out some to dry as well - the berries were soaked for a overnight in sugar (I used only about 15% sugar against berry weight) before being cooked till it sets. Anyway, the sugared ones stayed most bright when I dried them at 65°C over 6 hours, and they’re really tasty too (inadvertently made shortcut candied strawberry)
I’ve yet to add acid directly into the dough. Guess I’ll try that after some espresso cake and crostata bakes this week. :)
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Nice comparison with different soaks before drying. Freeze drying seems to be the best way to retain the colour.