Hibiscus flowers (flor de jamaica) make an extremely vibrant pink/purple tea with some really nice floral and tart flavors. I'm starting to experiment a little bit more with using other hydration sources instead of water for my bread baking. I recently baked a loaf of bread that only used a milk stout instead of water and it turned out really good.
I was hoping this bread would pick up some of the purple coloring from the hibiscus tea but it really just turned out kinda grey. I wasn't sure how much hibiscus to use and only used 10g of dried hibiscus flowers in 420g of water. Next time I'll up that to 30g in a similar amount of water to see if that boosts the color at all.
The addition of the lemon zest gives this bread an incredible smell that reminds me a lot of scones. I was a little hesitant to use the zest since I thought i might be restricted to only making toast with this bread, but it actually made great toasted sandwiches as well.
Rather than using my sourdough starter I've been using bakers yeast to quickly turn around some of these experiments.
I have my full write-up with more photos and method here: https://alegrebread.com/2019/05/18/hibiscus-w-lemon-zest-bread/
Ingredients:
- 500g bread flour
- 390g hibiscus tea
- 10g dried hibiscus (for tea)
- 11g sea salt
- 3g lemon zest
- 2g bakers yeast
Method:
- Make your hibiscus tea. I knew I needed 390g of tea so I heated up 420g of water and added my hibiscus. The hibiscus will absorb some of the water so you don't want to start with your final amount of water or else you won't have enough. Let this steep for about 10 minutes, or until the temp of the tea drops to about 92-93'F
- Strain the tea and collect 390g
- Autolyse the tea with the flour for 30 minutes
- Mix in the salt, zest and yeast
- Perform 4x stretch and folds over the first 90 minutes of a 5 hour bulk fermentation
- Shape and let the dough proof for about an hour
- Baked at 450'F in a dutch oven for 38 minutes covered, then 14 minutes uncovered
Here are some photos from the experiment:
- Tandem Tails's Blog
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Very interesting and innovative. I look forward to reading about your progress.
Dan
Thanks! Experimenting with recipes is a great creative outlet haha
including the tea also into the bread? How chewable are the flowers after brewing?
The colour of the tea may darken considerably if left overnight.
Flour tends to dilute a lot of flavours. Don't be afraid to really zap a dough with flavour. Or half of one.
Bread looks lovely! Ooooo, great write up on link!
The tea is all I included in the bread. I just composted the flowers after making the tea. I wouldn't want to put those in the bread since I can't imagine they'd lend anything good to it. Next time I'm going to use a lot more flowers and make a much more potent tea.