Fail: Sourdough Cinnamon Cranberry Bread

 Spoiler: This week's sourdough adventure did not turn out well.  

A very tasty brick.

As you may already know, cinnamon has antibacterial properties.  Sourdough needs yeasties and bacteria in order to rise. This is why you so often see cinnamon swirl breads, where the cinnamon is introduced after fermentation and most of the rising has already occurred. Because adding cinnamon at the beginning will retard that bulk fermentation process.  

...but I'm lazy and don't like extra steps, and because my dough often tends to be wet, it doesn't lend well to rolling out and adding a "swirl" layer in, as first discovered when I was trying to make spent grain bread.  So I've generally just been trying to focus on finding recipes where the add-ins can be mixed directly into the dough.  I found this recipe from Lynn's Way of Life on Pinterest which incorporated everything in, so I tried that.  The only modification to the recipe was that I used dried cranberries instead of raisins, because that's what we had in the pantry.

The recipe clearly notes that because the cinnamon is mixed in early, fermentation may take longer than a normal loaf.  But a compounding issue here is that I was off on my timing with my starter.  Saturday is typically my baking day, so Friday night I pull my starter out of the fridge, let it get active overnight, use that fairly active "discard" in a recipe, then feed my starter and put it back in the fridge.  But I forgot to pull my starter out of the fridge on Friday.  So instead, at some point on Saturday (which had a lot of other things going on), I pulled my starter from the fridge, fed it, and then left it out on the counter, optimistically (and erroneously) thinking I would make my dough that evening once it was bubbly.  But by the time it was was ready, I was not. I was busy making gumbo and didn't feel like messing with it.  So I left the starter out on the counter overnight and planned to make my dough the next morning.

Somewhere in there, I'm pretty sure the starter had already reached it's peak. It was still very bubbly when I made my dough the next morning, so I figured all was well. But I think between the starter already being headed back towards hunger, and the cinnamon mix-in on top of that...she just didn't rise. Like, AT ALL.

Folded and in the pan.  I gave it some extra time to "rise" in the fridge overnight...which it did not.

Very dense crumb.

Even though it was super dense, the flavor was still really good, especially toasted and with butter. My husband called it "bagel bread".  So I would be willing to attempt this recipe again with my usual process. I've never used the float test to confirm my starter is ready, but this might be a good time to try that, just to make sure the dough has a fighting chance at rising in spite of the cinnamon.