There are so many beautiful loaves of bread on (Not)Recipes, but ink and lemon (a.k.a Lucy)'s caught our attention because it's spotted with chocolate polka dots:
I used a lowish- hydration dough with a one hour autolyse. After the first set of stretch and folds, separated out about a third of the dough and worked in a paste of cocoa powder and water. After bulk fermentation, divided chocolate dough into twelve pieces and shaped into balls, then individually wrapped in master dough and squished together into a boule. Proof, score and bake as normal.
As she wrote on her blog by the same name, her project was inspired by giraffe bread, which is sometimes confused with tiger bread, a.k.a Dutch Crunch bread—which has a crackly, sectional top thanks to a pre-bake rice paste coating. (Judging from what I've found on Instagram and Pinterest, giraffe bread seems to have more traction outside of the U.S.—at least as of now.)
A couple weeks back, Lucy followed a recipe, which she translated from Spanish, for giraffe bread made with a simple yeasted milk dough.
But having caught the sourdough bug, she wanted to apply the same technique—split up the dough and color part of it with cocoa powder, then wrap the plain dough around logs of the chocolate sections—using her starter. So...
- She mixed together her basic sourdough formula (150 grams starter, 275 grams water, 25 grams olive oil, and 500 grams all-purpose flour).
- Let it autolyse for an hour in order to allow the flour to hydrate and to make dough easier to handle.
- And then worked in 10 grams of salt dissolved in a tiny bit of water.
- Then, she separated out about a third of the dough and mixed in the cocoa paste (40 grams cocoa stirred with 60 grams water).
- She let the dough rise before dividing it up into balls and wrapping the plain dough around the cocoa kind.
- Squished it all together into a boule, proofed again, and baked as normal. Ta-da!
"The cocoa powder paste was a tiny bit bitter, but only in the good way," said Lucy. And since she didn't add any sweetener to the bread, it's just as good with cheese as it is with jam.
And now we're left wondering: What other flavors, pastes, and patterns are possible?
Got ideas? Share them in the comments! Also, if you have any other animal-themed breads on your mind, those go in the comments, too.
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