Blueberry Sourdough Bread

If you are bored with eating plain bread, adding fruit/vegetables/herbs or cheese is a great way to zhuzh up your regular bread. Have you tried my Olive & Rosemary sourdough? I also have a Spiced & Dried Fruit sourdough and Orange Scented Fruit sourdough. They are all super popular on the blog!

As you can see I love adding dried fruit to my bread but for this one I am using fresh blueberries. I get it, if you'd rather have your fresh berries as a snack, I mean they are too good to be thrown in bread right?. I often make this bread when I have some leftover berries sitting in the fridge for weeks. No one likes them when they are not super fresh and got a wrinkly skin. So I just throw them in the bread dough instead.

This makes a regular white sourdough pop with color and you will bite into a tang berry here and there which is very satisfying.

If you want to give this a try and don't have fresh berries? Dried works too. Just soak them in warm water for a few hours.

The first few steps until the second fold is similar to that of making a regular sourdough. The only difference here is that instead of the third coil fold, I will be incorporating the berries. Nonetheless, I will mention all the steps so you wouldn't have to jump between recipes.

Get your levain ready. If you keep your starter in the fridge, take it out and bring it to room temperature. And then let it get activated. Remove some of it and feed the starter. Once this is active and bubbly, you can use some of it to make this bread.

It will look like this. A little wet. Now cover this bowl and set aside for about an hour.

Now let it rest in a warm place, covered and perform two coil folds at 45 minute intervals.

Then take the dough out on to a bench and stretch gently as thin as possible without tearing.

Once the dough is folded back together, place this in a bowl, cover and leave in a warm place for about 2 hours (or until it has nearly doubled in size) for the final bulk fermentation.

If you ferment longer, the oven spring will be less but there will be more sour flavor and less gluten (more digestible)

Preheat the oven to 500°F. Score the bread and place in the oven.

Use your regular baking method. Use a DO or bake on a steel with convection setting ON.

This is my baking setup. I use a bakingsteel.

Baking steel (you can use a pizza stone/any heavy oven proof base)provides constant heat from the bottom of the loaf, which helps oven spring and open crumb. The steel is heavy and should be pre-heated with the oven. Even though the thermometer placed inside the oven registers 500F, the steel may still be heating. So I usually give another 20-30 minutes for the steel to heat up.

Always let the bread cool completely before cutting into it. This helps with cleaner cuts. As the bread cools down, some of the moisture will evaporate, making the crust even more crispier.