Purple Sweet Potato Sourdough Bread

Do you know purple sweet potato?

Purple sweet potatoes are sweet potatoes with beautiful vivid colour. I've never seen them in the UK but they are quite popular in Japan, especially I see a lot of purple sweet potato desserts in Okinawa, south coast of Japan.

I've got a sachet of purple sweet potato powder in my cupboard, and tried using it with my sourdough bread.

Ingredients:

Strong organic white flour 250g

Starter 125g

Purple sweet potato powder 5g

Milk 178g

Salt 4g

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Look at the crumb! What a pretty pink! That must put a big smile on your face when you cut into it, right? (It did to me anyway....) :D

Not like the sensational colour, I couldn't really taste the sweet potato..., but the texture was good. The nice bit of toughness and slight chewiness was there.

Interested in getting some sweet potato powder?

Here is a link (it's in Japanese) ; パイオニア企画 紫芋パウダー 20g×5袋, or if you would like information in English, message me.

Sourdough pain de campagne

What sort of flour do you use for your breads?

I've been using the same flour for a while and wanted to try something new to see what difference the flour can bring to my bread.

I went to a local whole food shop and bought a bag of Gilchesters Organics Unbleached White Strong Wheat Flour to try it out with my Pain de campagne. (Recipe here.)

You can get their flour on the Gilchesters Organics website or on Amazon.

So, how is this flour?

It's pretty different from the strong white flour that I normally use. It's unbleached, so obviously the colour is not 'white' but more like nice caramel colour. It absorbed the liquid quickly and very well, which I think is a good thing because you don't damages the dough by mixing too much.

When it comes to the strength of the dough, I felt it was a little weak, and that effected the crumb to be more of a crumbly side than a chewy (it's a personal preference but I like my crumb to be more chewy...)

The loaf rose well.

The crust was good too. It had nice toughness and lovely colour. ;)

And, it tasted great. This flour brought out just the right amount of that unique sour taste of sourdough bread.

The recipe needs a bit of modification for this flour, but all in all, I really like this stone ground white flour. ;D

PS. This bread is also excellent for sandwiches!

Pain de Campagne with Rose sourdough starter

I've learnt my lesson...

'The starters are all different just like we are.'

Do you remember my rose sourdough starter that I made back in June? The starter has been considerably less active and smelt much more sour than my other starters. So, I thought... 'I'm going to feed it again and if it's still not looking better, I've got to say bye bye to this starter...'

I fed it as usual. I left it overnight as usual.

But still, it looked bit sad... ;(

Because I was reluctant to throw my starter away, I left it out for a few more days, and guess what! it started to look and smell better! So, I fed it one more time and the following morning it was as active as my other starters.

It seems that all it needed was a bit more time in room temperature...

To test my newly revived rose starter out I made a simple wholemeal pain de campagne.

It rose (oh rose!) well. It baked very well. And most importantly it tasted amazing!

Ingredients for simple pain de campagne;

Starter 125g

Strong white flour 200g

Wholemeal flour 50g

Milk 170g

Salt 4g

Oil

I was so glad that I didn't throw this starter away.

The rose starter reminded me of this... 'The starters are all different, so don't rush them. Watch your starter carefully and know your starter well so that you know what the starter really needs (whether it's water, flour, temperature or time...) to be its best!' 

Purple sweet potato bread

Since we fired up the oven for the pizza, I decided to have a go with baking my bread in the stone oven for the first time.

The bread I chose was Purple sweet potato bread, a variation of simple pain de campagne. I added purple sweet potato powder as I was mixing the dough, which coloured the dough nice baby pink;)

So, the verdict of baking in the stone oven is...
'Not too bad but needs work'...

Although the thermometer said it was around 280 ºc, I don't think the bottom heat wasn't high enough and also the heat circulation wasn't great. I think I need to learn how to build a better fire. :)

The bread still came out ok. The crust was thinner and softer than usual, which I would have liked to be tougher, but Lana prefers softer crust and she actually ate the whole thing! (She normally leaves the crust...)

I couldn't really taste the purple sweet potato but still the colour was pretty.

Pink + Pink♥︎ I made some salmon sandwich. 

♡ Pain de campagne ♡

'Heart' pain de campagne, this is what I made for Andy as a Valentine's gift. (I did make Valentine's dinner dessert as well.;D)

Half white and half wholemeal flour, made with my strawberry yeast. It's simple but certainly have that 'got-to-have-another-slice' feel to it...

Humm, broken heart? (Andy cut this...)

It's great toasted and buttered, of course;)

By the way, look at my new bread knife. 

It's super cute and very sharp!