Let's continue the previous post (click here to open it) about natural coloured addings to bread dough.
What concerns the amount of natural coloured powder, I'd advice to start experimenting with 3-5% of the total flour amount for a particular dough (400 g flour - 12-20g coloured powder). It's a safe amount of powder that will probably not affect the gluten a lot by its enzymes activity during fermentation process. If the flour is strong enough - try to put more powder, if weak - better to put less.
At what step to add? Here I usually keep in mind 3 points:
✏️ which flour I'm going to use: with strong gluten or not
✏️what kind of a retard the dough will have: short warm or cold overnight
✏️whether the superfood powder is too rich in enzymes or not
📌Enzyme activity of a particular powder you can try in advance on a small piece of dough (~50g of flour). It's better to do it like this just not to spoil a lot of good flour, because once I used a spirulina powder that within an hour ruined all the gluten in 400 g of great flour😥
📌When you are sure that your flour can develop 💪 strong gluten, you can mix coloured powder together with flour and water and leave the dough for the autolyse in the fridge.
📌When your flour is not very strong, it's better to add it later: mix the powder with a small amount of recipe water and add this mixture into the dough almost at the very end of mixing the final dough, when the gluten has already formed its strength.
📌If you are not sure about your flour strength or you know that it's weak, or the powder is quite active, you can sprinkle the powder onto your dough during the lamination. In such a way you will be able to save the dough strength till the baking time.
📌And don't forget about the retard time: the longer the retard, the later you should add the powder to the dough. All these steps are necessary to let the gluten remain strong enough to rise the bread in the oven, but at the same time have a beautiful colour and taste of bread while using natural coloured powders.
✏️There is also a variant of adding coloured powders at the step of preparing levain, which I will share with you next time😉✨