This bread is delicious and light with an absolutely stunning color.

Total Cooking Time: 2 hours 45 minutes

As part of the Great British Bake-Off Challenge that I’m doing, I had to make Beetroot bread for the week three bread week showstopper. This bread was meant to bring a vibrant reddish pink color to the naturally colored bread sculptures. While the bread itself has a delicious earthy flavor and a stunning color, this bread was temperamental. The added moisture from the beet puree is a very big unknown factor and requires by eye adjustments.

Ingredients

The non-classic bread ingredients required for this recipe is sugar, beet puree, and olive oil. I chose to make my own beet puree which I’m still unsure if that was the best decision. Making puree is easy but controlling the water content of the puree can be tricky.

Process

01

Making the Dough

To make the dough, I started by mixing together all of the dry ingredients: flour, salt, sugar, and yeast. I added the water, beet puree and olive oil after all of the dry ingredients were evenly distributed. This is where I first realize I had made a mistake. I never checked the water content of the beet puree. It clearly was higher than I expected as the dough because a gloopy and sticky mess. I was able to resolve this problem by balance the wet out with more dry ingredients (see lessons).

I used the stand mixer for all of the previous steps because it was much easier to balance out the ingredients while I still had use of my hands. After the dough was decently kneaded by the stand mixer, I turned it out onto a floured surface and gave it some more kneads before shaping it and leaving it to prove.

02

Shaping the Bread

The challenges of a stick dough also came back to bother my in shaping the bread. My original plan was to make the beetroot into rose like shapes similar to the turmeric bread. The dough decided that would be impossible just given how sticky it decided. I had to pivot my plans and I decided to make another classic flower shape from the dough.

This turned out to be a bit chunkier in design but each leaf being shaped separately allowed the bread to easily be pulled apart. I left the dough to prove one more time before baking

03

Baking

The bread can bake for a shorter amount of time since each loaf is smaller than a classic sized rolls. I baked them for about thirty minutes, but I would still check the doneness of the bread before removing it from the oven. There should a color added to the crust from baking, and it should feel light like a standard bread.

Reflections

This bread proved to be my biggest challenge out of the three breads I had to bake. The unknown liquid quantity added from the beet puree really was a curveball that I don’t know I was fully prepared to handle. If this is something you want to attempt, I would recommend using a store-bought beet puree to help control the water consistency.

Lessons

The Balance of Bread

Bread is a very delicate balance between wet ingredient, dry ingredients, and yeast. The dough needs to be wet in order to feel the yeast, but it cannot be so wet that the bread isn’t able to build up the gluten and hold its shape. When bread gets too wet, flour will be the balance. When the bread gets too dry, water will be the balance. But more ingredients does mean a longer rising time for the dough to get that air spread throughout the bread.