Cold weather = soup weather, which means using up a ton of bread for some soup dunking. We already blew through all the Paprika + Pepperjack sourdough I had baked last week and it was time to make something else that leaned more toward the savory side. I looked through the fridge for inspiration and found some oil packed sun dried tomatoes as well as a few oil packed roasted peppers. Could these be used in a bread? Let us find out!

Schedule

Using the lazy sourdough method is actually quite simple. The real key to this method is that you can use your unfed starter straight from the fridge without the need to make a levain. There’s also no autolyse which saves about 30 minutes.

Schedule: Here’s a link to the lazy sourdough method.

The exact schedule I used is at the bottom of this post.

Ingredients:

Dough

• 900g bread flour
• 100g rye flour
• 750g filtered water @ 88’F
• 200g unfed starter straight from fridge (100% hydration)
• 22g sea salt
• 18g (2 each) roasted red pepper
• 45g sun dried tomatoes

Method:

I wanted to try really incorporating the peppers and tomatoes into the dough so I figured the best method would be to blend them and combine them with the flour. To do this, I added the peppers and tomatoes to a cuisinart and pulsed them until they were just shy of a paste. After that I added a half cup of flour (from my pre-weighed portion) and pulsed it a few times. I repeated that two more times until the flour had absorbed all of the pepper and tomato mixture and was a nice red color.

After mixing all the ingredients with the pepper and tomato infused flour, I performed 4 stretch and folds within the first 2 hours. I let the dough bulk ferment at room temperature for a total of 8 hours.

Once the dough had doubled, I shaped the loaves and put them in bannetons that I liberally dusted with rice flour. I put the bannetons in vegetable bags and then placed them in the fridge for a 17 hour cold proof.

One hour before baking I started preheating the oven, with dutch ovens inside, to 450’F. When it was time to bake, I took the loaves straight from the fridge and placed them in the preheated dutch oven, gave each some quick scoring and then put them in the oven.

I baked the loaves at 450’F for 20 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch oven and baked for an additional 33 minutes.

Result:

The smell of the bell pepper and sun dried tomato were amazing once they were in the oven. It made me think about using this same method for pizza crust, as the added tomato and pepper flavors would give the pizza a huge savory boost.

The pepper and tomato gives this bread an amazing color. The crumb and crust are both a nice light red/orange color. The pepper and tomato lend a lot of savory and earthy flavors.

I could probably add more red peppers and sun dried tomatoes next time, but I wanted to be a little more on the cautious side for this experiment.

I was also playing around with my scoring technique and I think I’m finally starting to get a hang of it. I’m pretty happy with how a nice ear formed on one loaf and my lighter scores formed a cool pattern.

My Baking Notes

• Ambient Temperature: 68’F
• Mixed @ 12:45pm on October 26th
• Water temp: 88’F
• Dough was 81’F after mixing
• 4 stretch and folds over first 90 minutes
• Started proof in fridge @ 9:00pm
• Into oven @ 1:45pm on October 27th