culinary near-miss

[cellio]

I wanted to make banana bread last night using the bread machine. I've never made banana bread before (with or without a machine). I got out the book of recipes only to find that the only banana-bread recipe is for a "quick bread". I've never made quick breads, because the manual contains warnings about them being fragile, about needing to tweak cooking time on the fly, and so forth. That's too much work; I want to dump stuff in the machine and ignore it until it brings forth bread three or four hours later.

So I started comparing quick-bread recipes to regular-bread recipes to figure out the mapping. The big difference, of course, is that quick-breads don't use yeast; they use baking soda instead. There was nothing that existed in both quick and regular forms, but after looking at several recipes I concluded that this was the only major difference. I was concerned that the quick-bread recipe might have too much liquid, but I decided to forge ahead anyway. (I did make one other substitution, water for milk, because I keep my bread machine parve.)

So I used the quick-bread ingredients, without changing quantities, but then instead of the baking soda I used the canonical 2 teaspoons of yeast from the regular recipes. During the first mixing the "dough" looked positively soupy, so I added one more cup of flour and helped the machine stir it in. It still looked soupy, but I decided to leave it alone.

Three hours later the bread looked like bread rather than soggy glop. However, it had overflowed the pan rather thoroughly, creating a mess that I will deal with more thoroughly tonight. Because of this, there was no chance of removing the loaf cleanly from the pan. I ended up using a spatula to carve out the main part. I still didn't know what I would find inside at this point, but I had just given up on presentation.

The interior is bread-like and tastes fine. There was some caked flour in the corners, but otherwise the mix of ingredients seemed to be right. Next time I'll just scale it all down to 75% or so.

Comments

DK bread porn

[magid.livejournal.com]

The book is actually called Ultimate Bread, by Eric Treuille and Ursula Ferrigno, published by Dorling Kindersley. It's a pretentious title, and there are definitely a couple of holes here and there, but it's a beautiful book. (There's a section on quick breads, too.)

So, it turns out that there are two recipes that might be of interest. Carrot bread uses freshly grated carrot (or a variant with beets), while pumpkin bread uses (cooked) pureed pumpkin. (Extremely abbreviated directions, btw.)

Carrot Bread
has 2 tsp yeast
1.25 c water
3.5 c flour
2 tsp salt
0.5 lb grated carrot
1 tbsp melted unsalted butter

If your yeast needs proofing, add it to 0.5 c water, then 5 min later add that to the flour and salt. Add carrots and butter and remaining water. Form dough. Knead until smooth but still sticky. Put in bowl, cover, let double (1-1.5 hours). Punch down. Rest 10 minutes. Shape into a round loaf. Put on floured baking sheet and let rise, covered, until double, about 45 minutes. Bake in preheated 400 F oven for 45 minutes, until golden. Cool.

Pumpkin Bread
has 15 oz pumpkin puree
2 tsp yeast
2 tsp honey
4 c flour
2 tsp salt
egg glaze (1 egg yolk and 1 tbsp milk)
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds, for topping

Proof yeast in 0.25 c water, if needed. Add honey after 5 minutes; stir to dissolve. Add to flour and salt, then add pumpkin puree. Mix to form sticky dough. Knead until very smooth, silky, elastic. Put in bowl, cover, let rise until double, about 1.5 hours. Punch down, let rest 10 minutes. Shape into round loaf. Put on oiled baking sheed, let rise (covered) until doubled, about an hour. Brush with egg glaze and sprinkle pumpkin seeds on top. Bake in preheated 425 F oven for 40 min, until golden. Cool.

(Note: I use a kind of yeast that doesn't need proofing in water first, which is why I changed the directions to say to proof the yeast if needed.)

Re: DK bread porn

[cellio]

Thank you! And thanks especially for the name and author info for the book; now I know why "Dorling Kindersley" wasn't making for happy searches. :-)