Sweet Potato Walnut Pecan Einkorn Sourdough

[Benito (Benny)]

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.

[Benito (Benny)]

Here’s the crumb, it seems quite tight in places, what do you think? Any suggestions to improve this for next time?

[Fermentada (Melissa)]

That looks beautiful. I’d seen Kristen do the two-dough lamination thing with a whole grain dough and a refined flour dough, and meant to try it someday. Very neat idea. The flavor profile sounds delicious too!

[Benito (Benny)]

Thank Melissa. I love some of Kristen’s ideas and methods. I’ve only recently being trying lamination and really enjoy using it. When I first saw this dual layer lamination method months ago I thought there was no way I could do it. In fact, it isn’t any harder than doing a single layer lamination. This was also the first time I successfully did add ins during lamination and again it is really easily and really does give you more even distribution of the add ins to the bread.
The flavour of this is really quite good, I love the subtle sweetness from the sweet potatoes and then the nutty crunch from the toasted nuts. I will try this without the nuts this week with the purple sweet potatoes, I can’t wait to see the colour of the crumb.