Blue Corn + Pepita Sourdough

I wanted to make a “New Mexico” sourdough but had recently made a loaf with green chile and another with red chile. What else is a typical New Mexican ingredient? Blue corn! Pepitas (or pumpkin seeds) are also used in a lot of Mexican and New Mexican cooking. Let’s combine these together into one delicious loaf!

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:

This recipe makes one loaf. Simply multiply all the ingredients by two if you only want two loaves.

Dough

450g bread flour
50g blue cornmeal
375g filtered water @ 88’F
100g unfed starter straight from fridge (100% hydration)
35g pepitas (plus more for topping)
11g sea salt

Method:

After mixing the dough, I performed 4 stretch and folds within the first 2 hours, adding the pepitas during the first fold. I let the dough bulk ferment at room temperature for a total of 7 hours. If your kitchen is on the cooler side, a full 8 hour bulk fermentation might be necessary.

Once the dough had doubled, I shaped the loaf and put it in a banneton that I liberally dusted with rice flour and pepitas. I put the banneton in a vegetable bag and then placed it in the fridge for a 17 hour cold proof.

One hour before baking I started preheating the oven, with a dutch oven inside, to 450’F. When it was time to bake, I took the loaf straight from the fridge and placed it in the preheated dutch oven, gave it a quick score and then put it in the oven.

I baked the loaf at 450’F for 20 minutes covered, then removed the lid of the dutch ovens and baked for an additional 30 minutes.

Result:

If you haven’t used blue cornmeal before, it can be used almost interchangeably with normal yellow cornmeal. The difference is the blue corn gives a nutty flavor and an obvious blue / purple hue to the bread. The blue cornmeal I use is a lot rougher of a grind, with some big and some small pieces.

The crumb has a great blue and purple tint to it and the pepitas are evenly distributed to it. The pepitas give an added boost of the nuttiness as well as some more texture.

This bread is perfect for sandwiches, french toast, garlic bread or just about anything else you need bread for. When friends and family see the color of the bread, they’re definitely going to say something!