This bread made last night and half eaten during this morning is a combination of Jeffrey Hamelman & Dan Lepard recipes. I took the amount of olives and salt from Jeffrey’s Olive levain and then added the amount of extra virgin olive oil in Dan Lepard’s Olive Oil Flatbread. It occurred to me if you’re adding olives to a bread why wouldn’t you add the fat made from them? This made complete sense to me.
I actually made two small breads one adding the extra virgin olive oil the other only the olives, the idea was to compare…and then I forgot which was which. Last night I gave away (without tasting) what I thought was the loaf containing olive oil but this morning tasting the crumb of the loaf left behind I could taste this wasn’t the case. The crumb of my loaf has the distinctive taste of olive oil and the softness you expect from adding fat to your sourdough. Obviously I gave away the wrong loaf.
The morning after, the crumb still has a delicious softness and I was eating it without anything. I’m sure the bread without the olive oil was also delicious but this will be my olive bread for the time being. I normally like to make a bread a few times before posting just to see if there any problems that arise but I wanted to publish this one straight away because I was so taken with it. I’ll give notes on the water/oil amounts and the olives.
Proving Baskets
I was very disappointed with the crust of this loaf. I used a proving basket (cane bannetton) and on turning out some of the dough was stuck and pulled the dough distorting the top. I was lucky it only half destroyed the height of it but this turns me into a disgruntle baker using proving baskets.
The other complain I have with proving baskets is what happen with a raisin loaf last night. I used a basket (lined wicker) and it didn’t stick which was good but once the dough was turned over it spread out more than I would have liked. This has happen over and over again. I seem to keep a better tighter boule shape when letting the dough prove on the baking sheet. I would really like to get on with baskets because they’re so simple to use especially when you have a few doughs to make but haven’t managed to get on with them thus far.
Olives
When buying olives in the supermarket my choice for pitted olives are really limited, normally I can only get those horrible shiny skin black olives that are in fact green olives dyed black with not much olive flavour. I don’t fancy stoning olives every time I make this bread so a jar of pitted kalamata olives came to my rescue, perfectly strong olive taste. I decided to leave them whole but found on folding them in they were slippery little monsters, didn’t like to be kept inside the dough and kept popping out. Next time some will be cut in half.
Olive Oil & Olive Sourdough
What I liked with this dough was having large bits of crumb without an olive this meant I could taste and appreciate the olive oil more without being over-powered by the olives, and then having a bite into an olive piece was like a treat.
Water & Oil – I’m giving the amounts here as I made it last night and it gives a fairly wet/sticky dough which I’m use to. I’m using a 12% protein flour so if your flour is a dryer flour which tends to be higher protein flour you may find it easier to handle or else cut back on the liquids and then work your way up to your comfort zone.
If you want to add fresh rosemary to this bread I normally add 4g finely chopped rosemary to every 500g of flour.
- 500g bread flour
- 200g levain (fed equal water/flour) 8-12 hrs before baking
- 300g water (cool but not cold)
- 80g extra virgin olive oil
- 7.5g fine sea salt (Jeffrey’s recipe states to lower the salt to account for saltiness in olives)
- 125g good strong pitted olives I used kalamata. Leave them whole or cut them in half.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This looks delicious. Oddly, I feel compelled to add raisins to it. I discovered how tasty the two are paired together in this Ottolenghi recipe. I can only imagine how nice it would be in sourdough bread.
Try it Monica – they’re both grown in the same type of climate. Olives have now entered all sorts of recipes like desserts, not always successfully but certainly it’s seen in more ways than the traditional way.