I had a blast making this bread, which I improvised beginning to end, including the decoration on top. I have a few ideas to adjust the design for a next adventure, but I am quite happy with the way this one turned out.

MARBLED SWEET POTATO SOURDOUGH
(from The Bewitching Kitchen)

500g bread flour
350g water
10g salt
75g sourdough starter (at 60 to 100% hydration)
25g sweet potato powder (I used this one)

Mix all ingredients except the sweet potato powder in the bowl of a KitchenAid type mixer fitted with the dough hook. Knead gently for about 3 minutes (first or second speed maximum). Weigh the dough, and remove approximately 1/3 of the amount to a smaller bowl. Continue kneading the white portion for another minute. Transfer to an oiled bowl. Place the smaller portion of the dough back into the mixer bowl, add the sweet potato powder and knead for another minute. You will probably have to knead by hand to incorporate the powder well into the dough, but no need to worry too much about it. Transfer that dough to a smaller, oiled bowl. Bulk ferment both portions folding them at every 45 minutes. Do that for 3 cycles, so the fermentation will last for about 2 hours and 15 minutes.

Forty five minutes after the last folding, stretch both doughs as a rectangle, ad place the purple on top of the white. Roll them together. Allow to ferment for another 90 minutes, with very gentle coil folds, twice, again, at 45 minute intervals.

Once bulk fermentation is over, shape the dough as a oblong loaf and place in a banneton. Move it to the fridge, covered, and leave it there overnight.

Next day, freeze the dough for 30 minutes in the banetton, to make it easier to score later. Invert the dough on a paper liner, rub a fine layer of Thai rice flour, and decorate with slashes or if you want to add a pattern, use an air-brush and a stencil to do so.

Bake in a Dutch oven with the lid on at 450F for 30 minutes, open and allow the bread to brown for a further 15 minutes. Depending on the decoration chosen, you can do a deeper scoring at 7 minutes into baking.

Cool completely over a rack before slicing.

ENJOY!

to print the recipe, click here

Comments: When marbling sourdough, I like to mix the two colors at least 2 hours into the bulk fermentation. At that point the dough is nice to work with, has some “strength” and you can easily stretch and manipulate. Once that is done, two more cycles of folding help the colors mingle, but be gentle, that’ s why I change to coil folds instead of full folding. You can check youtube for the way to do coil folding, but the name is pretty self-explanatory.

I used purple luster powder mixed with vodka in my air-brush, and a stencil that did not really have randomly placed stars, so I covered parts of it and arranged rows of stars all over. A few parallel cuts and into the oven it went…

Of course, the crucial moment is slicing this baby, and hoping for a nice marbling effect inside…
What do you think? Did I get it right?

If anyone is curious, the flavor of the bread is not changed by the sweet potato powder. It does change slightly the texture of the dough, but once it is all fermented for several hours, it acts pretty much like a single-color batch does. I hope you give this method a try, you can use butterfly pea flower powder, beet powder (make sure to add some vitamin C to keep the red color), or even charcoal powder for a black and white version.

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