Garlic Parmesan Levain

Profile picture for user Lazy Loafer

I'm having fun finding new, yummy add-ins for my standard Pain au Levain (see the Sage & Onion blog post for the formula). Today I made some loaves with roasted garlic, parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes and a bit of chopped rosemary.

Last year's garlic is starting to sprout (and sadly, this year's won't be ready to harvest until July), so I'm using it up. The sun dried tomatoes were soaked in hot water for a few hours then chopped, and the rosemary was fresh out of the garden.

Lovely dough, as always, after a few stretch & folds:

These loaves were baked in the Italian bread pans on granite stones, with steam added to a pan on the lower shelf. The scoring burst nicely with good ears, leaving a crunchy crust singing softly as it cooled.

Unfortunately my customers snapped them all up so I don't have a crumb shot, but this formula always yields an open, creamy, chewy crumb. I've asked them to send me email feedback so I know how it tastes!

Hmmmm, I kind of eyeballed it. I made a batch of four 750-gram loaves, and I'd say the add ins were about 1/4 to 1/3 cup mashed roasted garlic, 1/2 cup chopped soaked sun-dried tomatoes, probably a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh rosemary (I didn't want to overwhelm the other ingredients), and I'm not sure about the amount of grated Parmesan cheese. I think it was about 80 grams, but I probably could have used more.

As you can see, I'm a true Canadian, using mixed metric and Imperial measures. :)

dried tomato bread for the crust and put what ever you want on top.  That is what I do.  I have quite a few posts on this kind of Pizza using SD, straight yeast, yeast water, poolish or some combo levain.  It is one of our favorite flavors for all kinds of dough.  Here is one for buns but if you search for sun dried tomato you will find a whole bunch of pizza variations and other bread recipes using thee ingredients that Lucy has come with over the years

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/36549/yw-sd-ady-poolish-tang-zhong-rosemary-sun-dried-tomato-parmesan-buns

and a bread with added olives

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/44605/3-starter-italian-olive-bread-rosemary-and-sun-dried-tomato

I bet this would taste so great with just a simple pasta marinara or even a loaded lasagna!