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

[magid.livejournal.com]

Interesting; I've never thought to map a quick bread to a yeast bread (or vice versa). I've made sweet yeasted breads (cinnamon, chai, raisin, etc), but varied a yeast dough to do that, rather than starting with quick breads (which I think of as sweet and with a sort of denser-than-cake sort of crumb).

Oh, and the other difference for me (being non-bread-machine-endowed) is that a quick bread is a batter that I bake right then, while a yeast bread is a process that takes more time before I put it in the oven, but I can control the duration of the process by varying the amount of yeast and the temperature.

If it's useful, I know the bread porn book I have (the Dorling Kindersley bread book, with lots of photos) has a squash or carrot bread recipe; I'd think replacing banana mush for squash mush would work fine.

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

the funny bit is that I made banana bread last night. Though I didn't make it in a bread machine.

Banana bread is a seriously easy bread to make without a bread machine. It probably only takes ten additional minutes to assemble the ingredients, including mixing everything, and then you throw it in the oven for an hour or less (depending on the size of the loaf). I have several great (and easy) recipes if you want them.

As for quick breads in the bread machine, I have never experienced a problem with them, nor do I know of anyone who has. I'd recommend trying it once without altering the recipe, because I really don't think you'll run into the issues that the manual suggests.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

The idea of trying to turn a quick bread into a yeast bread had frankly never occured to me. I haven't had a whole lot of success making my own yeast breads, but I find quick breads to be easy and pretty forgiving (and I don't even have a bread machine). I'm surprised the manual made them sound so finicky, that hasn't been my experience at all.

[geekosaur]

My own instinct is that (a) quick bread doughs are a lot wetter than yeast bread doughs and (b) this will tend to encourage the dough rising too much. Then again, I always have to use less yeast than the recipe calls for because otherwise the machine always overflows... and this is with one of the early 3-cup-capacity machines (most bread machine recipes I see assume 2-cup-capacity machines, and I don't scale the recipes up).

I have a few bread books which might have some banana bread recipes in them. (I'm not especially fond of banana bread, so I generally skip over those recipes.)

BTW, my machine has a different setting for fruit breads than for sweet breads. I'd have to dig out the manual to see what the difference is, though.

[geekosaur]

Oh, and I'll agree with the other folks here: quick breads aren't finicky at all, they're dead easy and fast. The only way I can imagine them being finicky is that heavier add-ins are likely to sink to the bottom because the dough doesn't have much structural integrity... but you wouldn't normally use those in a quick bread anyway.