I’ve had some extremely fine ground blue cornmeal sitting in my pantry for a while and decided to bake up a couple loaves using some of the cornmeal. At only 8.5% of the flour, this gives it a nice flavor and color that makes these loaves unique. Walnuts help lend a little earthy nuttiness to the bread as well.

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 two loaves. Simply divide all the ingredients by two if you only want one loaf.

Dough:

• 915g King Arthur bread flour
• 85g blue cornmeal (finely ground)
• 765g filtered water @ 94’F
• 200g unfed starter straight from fridge (100% hydration)
• 22g sea salt
• 75g chopped walnuts (added at second fold)

Method:

A wide variety of blue cornmeal is pretty easy to find at various stores here in Santa Fe. I prefer using a really finely ground cornmeal when I’m adding it to bread, as the texture works nicer than coarsely ground meal. If you can only find coarsely ground cornmeal, You can blitz it in a spice grinder for a few seconds to get it to more of a flour consistency.

The lazy sourdough method doesn’t require an autolyse, so I started by mixing the flour, cornmeal, salt. After that, I heated up the water to 94’F and weighed my cold starter directly into the warm water. I gave it a quick stir to help distribute the starter into the water and poured it into the flour.

After mixing the dough, I performed 4 stretch and folds within the first 1.5 hours, adding the walnuts at the second set of stretch and folds. This gives the gluten a little time to develop without the walnuts getting in the way.

I then let the dough bulk ferment at room temperature for a total of 8.5 hours due to cold winter kitchen temps. Just watch your fermentation and gauge whether you need a longer or shorter bulk time.

I don’t know if it was due to the cold temps, the addition of the walnuts or a side effect of the blue corn (or some combo of the three), but I didn’t get as much rise during bulk fermentation as I was expecting. After 8.5 hours, I divided and shaped the loaves and let them sit on the counter for about 5 minutes. Finally, I 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 15 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 ovens, gave them a quick score 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 ovens and baked for an additional 30 minutes.

Result:

I should have baked these for a few more minutes without the lid to make the crust a little darker, but you can still see how the cornmeal contributed a slight pink/purple hue to it. There was some really nice blistering on both loaves and the oven spring and ear from scoring was pretty good.

When looking at the cross section of a loaf, you see a nice distribution of walnuts with some dark purple specks from the larger cornmeal grains. There’s a light purple color to the crumb which isn’t immediately noticeable and could be mistaken for a larger percentage of dark rye.

When eating a loaf, the walnuts give a nice nutty flavor while the blue corn gives it a nice toothsome feel. At only 8.5%, the blue cornmeal doesn’t come across too much in the flavor, but you can pick up some corn flavor when eating the bread by itself.

Changes for next time?

Next time I’ll up the blue corn to 10% to try and bring out the color and flavor more. I may try fermenting a little longer or make sure my kitchen is warmer to get a little more rise during bulk fermentation. I’ll also bake for a longer time uncovered to help darken the crust. The amount of walnuts was pretty good, so I’ll leave that alone.

Here are some additional pics of the loaves:

My Baking Notes

• Ambient Temperature @ mixing: 63’F
• Mixed @ 12:10pm on December 11th
• Dough was 78’F at mixing
• 4 stretch and folds in first 1.5 hours
• Started proof @ 8:20pm on December 11th
• Preheated oven @ 10:55am on December 12th
• Out of fridge and into oven @ 11:55am