It’s late summer here in Denmark and the green grocers and farmer’s markets are overflowing with ripe produce. There’s berries of all kinds: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, black and red currants, blackberries, even more exotic ones like gooseberries and lingonberries. One of my absolute favorites are blueberries. This is my recipe for a blueberry lemon sourdough bread.
This bread is inspired by one of my favorite breakfasts of all time. Small american fluffy blueberry pancakes. Well, it’s not a fluffy bread, but it does contain blueberries.
This bread requires you to have an active sourdough starter. If you don’t have one, you can make one easily, just follow my guide and recipe.
If you are new to sourdough bread baking, there’s quite a few techniques and lingo that you need to know and understand. If you haven’t baked one before, read my article about sourdough bread for beginners.
If you are just here for the recipe, you can press the button underneath to be automagically transported to the recipe:
Jump to RecipeBlueberries
Blueberries are common on both Europe, North America and Asia, but the common commercially available kind has its roots in North America. This berry has a blue exterior and white flesh.
There’s a version of the berry (which is known as bilberry) and are native to Europe. This berry has a darker blue colored skin, and the flesh is deeply red. We can sometimes get them at more specialized markets, but they are not so easy to come by.
Both are really good, but I would say that the European version has a darker, more intense taste, akin to a black currant.
Even though I bought some bilberries at my local market, I found that they are very brittle skin. I am sure that they would have popped while stretching and folding the dough. So this bread should be made with the North American variety.
The formula in this blueberry lemon sourdough bread recipe
The formula in this blueberry lemon sourdough bread is a white bread with no whole grains. I chose this to get a softer and whiter crumb. The inspiration for this bread came from american blueberry pancakes, which is a favorite of mine.
The levain is made from your 100% hydration sourdough starter, bread flour and water in a 1:2:2 proportion. This means if that it should double in 3-4 hours. If you want to get going faster you can change this to 1:1:1 so use the same amount of starter as flour and water. You should add the same amount of levain to the dough though.
| Weight | Ingredient | Baker's Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 36g | starter (100% hydration) | 50.0% |
| 72g | bread flour | 100.0% |
| 72g | water | 100.0% |
The bread itself is 70% hydration and should be manageable by most bakers. The lack of whole grain does make it a bit more slack. If you are worried about it being difficult for you, you can change the hydration to 65%.
| Weight | Ingredient | Baker's Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 723g | bread flour | 88.9% |
| 479g | water | 58.9% |
| 18g | salt | 2.2% |
| 250g | blueberries | 30.7% |
| 18g | lemon zest | 2.2% |
As always, if you want to play around with the formula, change the hydration or rescale it, you can find the formula here in my bread calculator.
Conclusion on this blueberry lemon sourdough bread recipe
Since the bread has no whole grain it is a white bread with a soft crumb. As soft as a classic sourdough bread gets.
The crust is deeply caramelized and super crunchy. Whatever blueberries stuck out of the dough, popped in the heat and gives the bread a gorgeous look.
The taste of sweet blueberries in the bread is great, and the lemon zest is fragrant and citrusy and stands up against the sweet blueberries.
It’s a bread that goes well with some wonderful butter, or maybe with anything where you’d put a jam on. So maybe a good piece of cheese.
I really enjoyed it and it is not the last time that bread enters my oven.
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This is my recipe for blueberry lemon sourdough bread. I hope you will try to make it. If you make this recipe and post it to Instagram, please tag me as @foodgeek.dk so I can see it. That will make me very happy.
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Blueberry Lemon Sourdough Bread
Ingredients
Levain
- 50 g sourdough starter 100% hydration
- 100 g bread flour protein content 12-13%
- 100 g water
Dough
- 723 g bread flour protein content 12-13%
- 479 g water divided
- 180 g levain
- 18 g sea salt
- 250 g blueberries
- 3 lemon zest from one lemon (that's 3 lemons in all)
Instructions
Make levain – Morning
- Mix 50g sourdough starter (100% hydration), 100g bread flour, 100g water in a jar with straight side.
- Mix well and place an elastic band around the jar where the mixture comes up to so you can monitor the growth.
- Put somewhere warm until it has doubled.
Autolyse the flour – Morning
- Add 723g of bread flour to a bowl. Pour 429g water on top (we are reserving 50g of the water to mix the salt in later).
- Put two fingers in the middle of the bowl and start moving it in circles.
- For each revolution pick up a bit more dough until the dough starts coming together.
- Then start folding the dough in over itself until all of the flour has been hydrated and you are left with a shaggy mess.
- Put a damp dish towel over top and let the mixture sit until we need to mix the dough
Mix the dough – Around noon
- Once the levain has doubled (or even tripled) proceed with this step.
- Grab the bowl with the autolysed flour.
- Pour 180g levain on top, sprinkle 18g sea salt on top and add the reserved 50g water.
- Dimple the levain into the dough and start folding it in over itself. You can also grab the dough and squeeze the levain through.
- Keep going until the dough is very well combined.
- Leave the dough to rest for 30 minutes under a damp dish towel.
Bulk fermentation – Around 13:00/1 p.m.
- Zest 3 lemons and chop the zest finely.
- Perform three sets of stretch and folds spaced out by 30 minutes.
- During the first set of stretch and fold, add the blueberries and lemon zest during each stretch and fold.
- After you've finished the third set of stretch and folds, do a windowpane test to check that the gluten has been properly developed. If it hasn't add one or two more sets of stretches and folds.
- After the windowpane test passes leave the dough to rest until it's grown by 30-50%.
Divide and preshape – Around 17:00/5 p.m.
- Pour the dough until your unfloured kitchen counter and divide it into two equally sized pieces of dough.
- Using your bench scraper, grab one piece and stretch each side (north, south, east and west) out and in over the dough.
- In one swift motion flip the dough over and put the bench scraper behind it.
- Pull the dough forward so that the top gets pulled down in front of the dough. If any blueberries pop out, pick them up and push them up underneath the dough.
- Once you can't get any further, put the bench scraper in front of the dough and push it away from your and turn it around so that the bench scraper is behind the dough again.
- Keep going until you have a pretty taut surface.
- Continue with the other dough piece and let them both rest for 15 minutes under a damp dish cloth.
- Ready two oval bannetons by spritzing them lightly with water and flouring them with rice flour.
- Once the 15 minutes are up, sprinkle the top of the dough pieces with flour.
- Grab one dough ball and flip it over. Stretch the dough out into a rectangle and fold the top corners in towards the middle.
- Roll the dough towards yourself and press down lightly with your thumbs to seal the dough. Keep going until the dough is an oval shape.
- Flip the dough into a banneton. I will often stitch the back of the dough when it's in the banneton. That gives a bit more tension on the top of the bread.
- Continue with the other bread and put both breads in plastic bags and put them in the fridge overnight.
Bake the bread – Next morning
- Add a baking steel and a dutch oven or a combo cooker to your oven.
- Preheat the oven to 260°C/500°F/Gas mark 9 (or 10 if you have it).
- Let the oven heat for an hour.
- Grab a banneton from the fridge and flip the dough onto a peel with parchment paper on it.
- Score the bread and put it immediately into the dutch oven and close it.
- Bake for 20 minutes with the lid on.
- After the 20 minutes, remove the lid and turn the oven down to 230°C/450°F/Gas Mark 8.
- Bake for another 20-25 minutes until the bread is deeply caramelized and crunchy on the top.
- Take the bread out of the oven and turn it up to 260°C/500°F/Gas mark 9 (or 10 if you have it) and bake the other bread.
Video
I am crazy about food, cakes, snacks and everything in between. I love to do tons of experiments to find the best recipe, so that you don’t have to.
Excellent Recipe.
You put a lot of Time & Hard Work into this recipe. Thanks for your expertise…
Thank you 🙂
Here in Brasil we have dryed Blueberries (Mirtilo). May I use them? The same quantity?
As I don’t know them it’s hard for me to tell, but I would soak them before I put them in the bread. It sounds tasty 🙂
Use the same amount, but reconstituted. Not sure how much water they soak, but try it out with a little portion first to get an idea 🙂
Can I use frozen blueberries?
Yes, that would work fine 🙂
can we use frozen blueberry instead of fresh blueberry? thanks for the recipe.
Absolutely 🙂