Bourke Street Bakery's Apple and Oat Sourdough - fresh fruit toast for a change
I still had some leftover home-grown apples (not from our home, unfortunately). These apples were delicious, juicy and slightly tart. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of apples they were. My guess would be ‘Golden Delicious’ because of its golden colour and sweet yet tart flavour.
We quite enjoyed the apple bread I made couple of weeks ago, from Dan Lepard’s Exceptional Bread. This time I wanted to try different recipe and my heart was set at apple and oat sourdough from Bourke Street Bakery cookbook. The apples that we had would be just enough for the bread.
I changed the recipe a little by substituting 10% of bread flour with rye flour. I also increased the amount of water a little (hydration ratio) my dough hydration (not including water in oat soaker) was 65% comparing to 62% in original recipe.
BSB sourdough recipe includes high ratio of starter, over 40% against total flour. Now that I was making bread during cold autumn mornings and nights, I found it worked out quite well with the fermentation and flavour. I also followed the book by feeding my starter three times at 8 hours interval before the final mixing, which, I believe, enhanced the flavour and gave better bread texture (the crumb were more open).
This is great tasting bread. I was amazed how flavourful it was. Oats contributed to moister crumbs and earthly flavour. The chunks of apples inside the bread also enhanced the flavour significantly. They gave such a nice aroma, and sweet & tart flavour to the crumbs around them. It felt like we were having a fresh fruit toast for breakfast. What a nice change from dried fruit toast, not to mention the real flavour and no added-sugar from dried fruits.
Comparing this bread to Dan Lepard’s I made the other week, we loved the BSB’s better. It’s is simple and clean flavour with fewer ingredients. It tasted simply better, or should I say it matched more with our taste buds or it was more Australian:P.
It also made me wonder what the bread would really taste like at Bourke Street Bakery itself. Sometimes, I just felt like flying to Sydney and find it out once and for all.
Full post and recipe is here.
Sue
Comments
with the apple design. I just treated myself to the book, I will have to try this !!
Thanks much,
anna
There are several good bread recipes in the book, and the tarts:). So far, I've tried and loved, to name just a few, Chorizo and Thyme roll, Mr Potato Bread, Chicken Sausage roll, and of cource the apple & oat bread.
Stencilling is an easy and effective way to pretty up the bread, heh:)
Sue
Chorizo, will try this one next !! Yum ...
Anna
Sue,
They look great especially the apple stencil. I like them toast and eat with butter perhaps a little brie to go with the bread. Jeffrey Hamelman’s apple bread recipe is also very good, he use apple cider in his recipe maybe you can bake them next time when you are looking for something new.
Kimmy
Yup, a good toast is not one without butter. We had them with hard cheese (cheddar). Soft cheese like brie would well too, I think,...thanks for the idea:)
I saw the apple bread recipe in JH book, I first thought that it needed apple wine in the recipe, until I finally realised that apple juice is called apple cider in US. Thanks for reminding me of the recipe...
Sue
sue i love your breads, i have this book too, and mr potato bread caught my attention right from the start, lol, and not just because of the title, jus looks so delicious. what did you think of it if you don't mind my asking? :)i'm not experienced with sourdoughs but really love the book. i loved the look of the bakery too.
I'm currently focusing on 'exceptional breads', so far I've only tried the baguettes, i blogged bout them recently:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23393/dan-lepard-baguettes
would love to know what you think of this book and the recipes you've tried :)
thanks for sharing
Mr potato bread is really flavoursome, apart from usual stuff for potato bread (potato, rosemary, olive oil...), the recipe got one ingredient that really lift the flavour tremendously, 'nigella seeds'. It just take the potato+rosemary to next level of tastiness. I totally love it! You can always replace the SD starter with commercial yeast (instant dry) at 2% of total flour, in term of Baker's Percentage.
I bought three books of Dan Lepard recently, Handmade Loaf, Exceptional Bread and Exceptional Cake. So far, still haven't got around to making many from the books. I found Dan Lepard SD starter recipe interesting, with different ingredients, which I am not exactly sure the purposes of that ingredient combinations. What I love about DL's books is to see breads from different cultures and countries. It is always interesting to see what is being eaten across cultures.
Your baguettes had nice scoring.
Sue
Hello Sue,
I wanted to write and say your delicious bread looks very pretty with the stencil.
Apple+oats=delicious! Your bread looks wonderful.
from breadsong
Complement on the stenciling means a lot when it comes from you, the master of stenciling:)
I am now a fan of apple & oats, they're simply wonderful together.
Sue