Another week, another batch of raspberries to use up. This week I’m going to use it in a sourdough, and I found this Paul Hollywood recipe for raspberry & white chocolate sourdough, which sounds like the perfect bread for Soph to have before breakfast for her half marathon this weekend.

However I’ve been fancying doing a braided bread, so what I’m going to do is this: make half the dough using raspberries for all the liquid, so it’s all red, then make the other half of the bread with water for the liquid and add the white chocolate to that, then do a four-strand braid.

It all starts with autolysing the flour and liquid. In the case of the raspberry portion it was 200g of raspberries from the garden, and just a couple of tablespoons of water to incorporate all the flour, but it turned out I didn’t really need the water, so the raspberry one is wetter than the plain one.

Due to being wetter the raspberry version took much more kneading, and it never came together in the same way as the white chocolate one. Of well… the bake’s going to be uneven :(

After bulk hydrating and rising I rolled out four strands.

Then proceded to braid. A couple of times I forgot which way I’d just braided: left or right but I think I got it all right in the end.

Pretty good eh? Problem is it’s way to long for the oven, so I had to bunch it up. And it didn’t bunch evenly :(

Once proofed it’s into the oven with the same ice cubes and foil roasting tin top as the baguettes I did last week.

Max temp for 30 minutes under the foil top, then down to 200C fan without the top for 15 minutes.

Looks good: the colour is still there.

It’s definitely stripy bread!

We had it as toast for breakfast with homemade jam, and it was delicious.