07/04/07

Cranberry Pumpkin Seed Bread

I have not been updating my blog lately as there was no fodder for the cannon. The 2 recent flops that I had was depressing. I was undecided about documenting the results. In the end, I decided not to as there was no educational value. The cause of the failure was simply due to over fermentation. I was at work at that time and gave instructions to my wife to pop the dough into the fridge after a couple of hours out on the kitchen counter. Unfortunately, I under-estimated the power of my culture. By the time I got home, the dough had already receded. The result was another 3 bricks like from my early experiments.

It was hard to decide what next to bake but since the fridge is overflowing with cranberries from Australia, I thought I'd redeem myself from some nagging by using up the cranberries asap. Since I was going to add cranberries, I thought, why not add some seeds to balance the fruit. How about some fennel to spice up the bread and some sweet raisins to balance the tartness of the cranberries. Since we have everybody on board, why not add a dash of lemon zest.

The dough had a pre-ferment which was 30% of the flour weight. The seed and fruit were also 30% of flour weight. Hydration was 75%.