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Carrot Sourdough Bread (with juice)

I tried in my previous video to make sourdough bread with pulp. I absolutely wanted to try the version with carrot juice also. I have to recognise that I like to drink carrot juice so, I'd rather prefer to use the pulp in bread rather than the juice. The juice loses some of the properties (like vitamins) during the process so this is why I think is better to drink it fresh. I run this baking test using carrot juice in this bread and I was not disappointed by the result.

Replacing the water with carrot juice is not exactly the same. Carrot juice is thicker as it contains some carrot particles inside. This has of course some impact. First, the dough feels stiffer and you need to increase the hydration (compared to the bread with pulp). Second, it will affect the gluten network. Those little particles act as a barrier to bound the gluten. These two impacts come to complete one to each other. If the dough is stiffer there is little need for extra manipulation of the dough to build the structure. When the gluten network is weaker, you need to add some extra dough handling. In the end, the difference in terms of the method is just that I added an extra coil fold and it went just fine.

As expected, the dough has an orange crumb. As for taste, I feel it a bit sweeter than normal bread and the flavour is clearly specific. However, none of these is pronounced: this is not a sweet bread/cake and does not smell strongly of carrots. The flavour is mild but noticeable.

I like this bread, although due to the reasons I mentioned above I won't do it very often. I prefer to use the discarded pulp in bread rather than the juice. You should however try this bread at least once to see how it tastes.