Choc chip & chestnut sourdough - an experiment that worked (mostly)

Like a lot of people I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon in lockdown #1 when yeast was scarce. And honestly, I’d never go back to mass produced sliced loaves - they’re night and day in terms of quality and enjoyment. I had to resort to buying sourdough for a couple of weeks while our kitchen was being refitted in summer and we’d exhausted our emergency frozen stash but it was nice to get back to baking our own.

Incidentally, sourdough is the ideal bread to make if you’re working at home and short on spare time. I literally timed it recently: to walk from my desk in the living room, to the kitchen, do a set of stretches on the dough and back to my desk: 2 mins 35 seconds. The rest of the time the dough is sitting in a bowl, fermenting and growing.  

Now I’m more familiar with sourdough ‘mechanics’ and characteristics I don’t mind experimenting occasionally. I haven’t yet got cheesy sourdough as flavoury as I’d like - maybe I just need to use a really strong cheese! And I’m still trying to master a nice flavoured sweet loaf, usually I don’t put enough flavouring in.

I know I can do it - earlier this year I made a rich chocolate sourdough that worked a treat and gave me the know how to sweeten the dough. The recipe I used for that one is from Hobbs House bakery (or you can order a ready baked one from them). 

So yesterday lunchtime, I started off a dough to my usual recipe (450g strong white flour, 100g active sourdough starter, 310g water). But I chucked in a tablespoon or so of golden syrup with the water plus roughly 2-3 tablespoons of cinnamon and 1tsp nutmeg to the flour before I mixed the dough. And when I say ‘roughly’...it was so slapdash you wouldn’t believe 🤣

I did the first couple of sets of stretches of the dough as per usual with 2-3 hours inbetween - then at 3rd stretch stage (after about 6 hours bulk fermentation), I manipulated it into a rectangle approximately A4 in size on a worktop sprayed with water. I had half a tin of chestnut purée left from something else so I added 2 tsp cold milk to make it more loose and spread it across the dough - then sprinkled about 30-40g dark chocolate chips across it. 

It was a very wet dough so I did my best to roll it up like a soggy Swiss roll, put it on a tray lined with baking parchment and consigned it to the fridge overnight.

This morning: oh my word....it had gone from my attempt at a Swiss roll to looking more like a splat, talk about spreading!! Trying to separate it from the baking parchment this breakfast time was a bit of an effort - after much paper tearing, effing and jeffing I did it though, gave it one more set of gentle folds on a floured worktop and put it on fresh parchment with semolina flour on. That went into my ‘Dutch oven’ (enamel roasting tin

with lid) and put it in the oven from a cold start, at 230° for 55 minutes while I had breakfast. It felt noticeably softer than a normal loaf when it came out and my trusty digital thermometer told me it was a shade under 89° internal temperature, so it went back in for 10 minutes and came out at 97° - and actually looking pretty good.

Compared to the sludgy mess it was when it came out of the fridge, what a transformation! It smelled lovely and hubby said he could even smell it upstairs - took a lot of willpower not to cut into it straight away. But when I did...well the crumb isn’t quite as airy as normal sourdough is but the extra moisture from the chestnut purée may have contributed to that. But I had a couple of little slices just say warm, and buttered - and YES! The flavours work, very nicely balanced. A lovely sweet teatime loaf.

So if you’re a sourdough baker and you’ve got an idea for flavours and not short on flour, get messing around and experimenting - you ever know it might just work!