Baking Craze Cont...

Now for the bread…

My story starts with too much oatmeal. I’d made extra because there was only half a cup left in the package, and for all the work involved you can’t just leave half a cup in the package, so I cooked it. Normally I’d just throw the leftovers in the fridge knowing someone would want a snack—(oatmeal, as I think I’ve mentioned doesn’t last very long at my house) but that day I was in the mood to bake.

So, I picked up the phone for a chat with Nana.

Now, before I tell you about that conversation however, you need to know that Nana is an amazing baker. Every week she bakes me 3 loaves of the most amazing whole wheat bread. Talk about spoiled, huh? She also bakes amazing rolls, pies, buns, cinnamon rolls and myriad of other things too numerous to list. Anyway…for the past several years I’ve gone on baking kicks, always trying to make my bread turn out as good hers…and of course….ending with varying degrees of success.

“What would happen if I tried to make bread with some of this leftover oatmeal?” I asked her.

Her reply was immediate. It would be great, and she used to make oatmeal bread all the time when I was little. (I don’t remember that…my memories are of ‘healthy’ whole wheat bread, but I’ll take her word for it.) Then she rattles off a recipe from memory while I frantically scribble down ingredients and measurements.

“Add some raisins and make cinnamon-raisin swirl bread,” she suggested. Then said, “after you add the cinnamon, mist it with a little water so it sticks together better”…and “a little sugar sprinkled on the cinnamon is nice”….and “let me know how it turns out, Honey.” I hang up the phone, shaking my head. OMG! Amazing.

And believe me it was…which is why I wanted to share it with you. I hope you’ll enjoy!

Oatmeal Raisin Cinnamon Swirl Bread

Makes 2 loaves

2 cups               water—warm (115 degree F or so)

¾ - 1 cup         cooked steel cut or Scottish Oatmeal—cooked

3 Tbs                 brown Sugar

3 Tbs                 butter (or 1 ½ Tbs butter and 1 ½ Tbs Shortening
                                          to extend shelf life)

5 tsp                   active dry yeast

5-6 cups            flour

2 cups                raisins

1 tsp                   salt

2 Tbs                  oil (for coating bread bowl)

2-3+ Tbs           cinnamon

1-2 Tbs              white sugar

Bottle with water for misting

Directions:

I usually use the dough cycle of my bread machine for this recipe but you could use a KitchenAid mixer with a dough hook or make by hand.

Place the water, oatmeal, brown sugar, butter, flour, yeast, and salt in the pan of your bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select the dough cycle and press start.

(If making without a bread machine, you may consider proofing the yeast in part of the warm water with some of the brown sugar before combining with the flour and oatmeal)

Keep an eye on your dough and add more flour if needed. About 5 minutes before the end of the kneading cycle add the raisins.

Pour oil into large bowl. Remove dough from pan and place in oiled bowl. Coat dough with oil and cover with plastic wrap. Allow bread to rise until almost doubled (30-45 minutes.)

Prepare loaf pans by spraying with no-stick cooking spray.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (175 C).

After dough has risen, punch down and pat dough into a large rectangle (about 1-inch thick) and sprinkle with cinnamon. Mist with water, and sprinkle on the white sugar. Roll dough into a 'log' and pinch edges closed.

Cut the ‘log’ in half and shape into a loaves.

Place into prepared loaf pans. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise additional 30 minutes or until nicely risen above the loaf pans.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until nicely brown.

Remove from loaf pans and brush top of loaves with butter.

This bread makes awesome toast. 

Pineapple Zucchini Bread

Late August always brings me Garden Fatigue. What started so hopefully in the spring and blossomed with joy as my garden grew all summer, has now withered with an overabundance of vegetables, and the grim reality (for me at least) of canning season. However, one bright star remains...Baking. I love to bake. And when I’m tired of zucchini fried, raw, steamed, stir-fried, grilled, and broiled, there is bread. I found this recipe (another cut from the Oregonian newspaper) and it has been my favorite since.

There is no author attribution on the yellowed newspaper clipping residing in my recipe book—but my eternal gratitude to the genius that shared this recipe. It's easily the best recipe for Zucchini bread I've ever tried.

As is always the case, the dump cook in me has refined and tweaked it, but the core remains. Baking offers special challenges for the dump cook—it being not as friendly to changes in amount and ingredients as other forms of cooking. Fortunately, a little extra zucchini here, or a few more raisins there, doesn’t seem to affect the taste of this bread. The recipes as it stands is wonderful, but try it with a streusel topping and it’s beyond. Nana tells me if you wait until the bread has cooked for 35 to 40 minutes and then add the topping, it won’t dimple in the middle as it does if you add it before baking. (Yep, I’m gonna try that next time…) Just be careful not to jostle the pans, as you don’t want it to fall.

I also have to confess to ulterior motives for posting this recipe online. My good friend Rosie, has lost it 4 years in a row now...and just last week she asked me for it again. This one’s for you Rosie! ♥ Happy Baking!

Pineapple Zucchini Bread
Makes 2 loaves

3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 cup shredded zucchini
8 ¼ oz can crushed pineapple, well-drained
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
¾ tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
¾ tsp nutmeg
1 cup pecans or walnuts--finely chopped
1 cup raisins, craisins, or currents


Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour, or spray with no stick cooking spray, two 8-by-4 inch loaf pans

Beat eggs, add oil, sugar, and vanilla, and continue beating until mixture is thick. With spoon stir in zucchini and pineapple.

In a separate bowl combine flour, soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, nuts, and raisins. Stir with fork to mix. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until just blended.

Divide the batter between the two loaf pans and bake for 1 hour or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean.

Cool in pans about 10 minutes and then turn out onto wire racks to cool thoroughly.

Streusel Topping: optional
(I usually don’t measure these, so amounts are approximate…feel free to improvise)

¼ cup flour
2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs white flour

Mix together with your fingers until you have a crumbly mixture. As mentioned above, add to top of bread after baking for 35 to 40 minutes.

Pizza!

What’s not to love? A crunchy, chewy crust, loaded with cheese, artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes and feta. Just writing those words sets my mouth to watering. On the other hand, maybe you prefer the Combo, loaded with spicy pepperoni, sausage, olives, and mushrooms, the Hawaiian, or the simplicity of fresh basil, garlic, tomatoes, and mozzarella—whatever your pleasure, pizza never fails to entice the soul to rapture.

We have always made pizza at home. This is not to say we don’t order in now and again, but for the most part, it is a homemade labor of love. Fresh ingredients and the freedom to be creative have given us a better pie than any a chain pizza store could produce, and that quality, taken together with our current economy, makes homemade pizza an awesome choice.

Homemade pizza is not hard. The crust is simply flour, water, oil, salt, and a little yeast—or if you’re feeling very creative, as I have been lately—sourdough. Often we will make pizza the night after having spaghetti and use the leftover sauce on our pizza. The toppings can be as simple or complex as your imagination allows. You don’t even need a red sauce if you don’t want—Italian herbs and garlic in olive oil is just as tasty. Here is a simple but wonderful recipe for pizza dough. It makes four small pies (~8 inch).


Pizza Dough
1 cup warm water
1 Tbs extra virgin olive oil—can us any oil really
1-2 tsp honey or other sugar
3(+/-) cups flour
1 tsp kosher salt—less if you use table
1 package yeast (2 ½ tsp)

In a small bowl, mix the yeast and honey with ¼-cup warm water –let sit for 5 minutes. In a mixer with a dough hook, combine remaining water with the flour, salt and oil and your yeast mixture. Mix on low until the dough comes away cleanly from the sides of the bowl, about 5 minutes. Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead for 2-3 minutes. Place in oiled bowl and cover with a piece of plastic wrap or damp tea towel. Allow to rise for 30 minutes.

After rising, divide the dough into 4 pieces, shaping it into smooth ball like clumps. Allow to rise for another 20 minutes. Your dough is now ready to use. Preheat your oven to 500 degrees. If you have a pizza stone, place it in the oven to heat.

We use ‘no-stick’ tin foil or parchment papers to prepare our pizza’s as it makes for easy cleanup. Gently stretch your dough into a circle. Add the toppings of your choice—be as creative as you like. Bake for 10-13 minutes or until crust is nicely brown and cheese is melted.

(This recipe can also be made in a bread maker. Put the ingredients in your bread maker in the order in which they appear. Use dough setting. Rise for 30 minutes, shape into balls and rise additional 20 minutes.)

One other note: Sometimes it is too hot outside to use the oven. We have used this recipe and baked the pizzas successfully on the grill. If you want to do this, my best advice is to limit the amount of toppings so they cook quickly and to use the no-stick tinfoil. You'll have a super crispy and delicious crust. Enjoy!

Sour Reconnections

What is this longing to reconnect and acknowledge the past and those who came before? Is it a quest to understand—to remember? We study history. We read books about the past and try to place ourselves in the lives of the characters who lived there. We imagine what it would have been like to be a gold miner on our way to Alaska, a baker living in San Francisco before the Great Earth Quake, or a fur trapper in the wilds of Montana. We might imagine our great, great, great grandmothers on homesteads throughout America and wonder what delicacies were created in their pioneer kitchens. In some instances, we are lucky and those recipes are handed down through the generations. In others, they are forever lost. What fun then, to rediscover recipes long forgotten?

With that in mind, I’ll tell you about my new pet. It lives on my kitchen counter and is very well behaved. Aside from needing to be fed once or twice a day, it requires very little in the way of love and affection. I never have to take it out for a walk or do the pooper scooper thing. In all, not a bad pet. In return for my care, my yeasty beasties give me wonderful baked goods—the most delicious sourdough imaginable.

No one knows who first discovered the process of leavening bread with yeast but historians think it happened in Egypt. Imagine you are an Egyptian chef in the palace of the pharaoh. One bright summer morning, you’ve combined water and flour, maybe a little milk and oil to make the pharaoh’s hard, flat dinner cake, when in rushes a messenger.

“Baker,” he yells at you, “you must come quickly! There has been an accident. You are needed urgently at home.” The pharaoh’s dinner forgotten, you rush home. While you are away, natural yeasts present in the flour and milk, and maybe others floating in the air which land in your bowl, begin to ferment in the warm summer sun. The yeast uses the flour and water as food and produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct of their reproduction. When you finally return, hours later, you barely notice the bubbles now present in your mixing bowl. You go about making your flat cake as usual, mind preoccupied by the crisis at home. When you pull your cake out of the oven, you are horrified. Pharaoh is expecting his dinner and his cake looks nothing like it usually does. It is abnormally thick and deformed. However, you haven’t anything else to replace it, so with trepidation and remorse you set it before the king and hope for the best.

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(Fabulous!) He shouts. “Promote this baker to head chef.” You sigh and return to the kitchen thankful to have escaped death and clueless as to what you did to make the cake so delicious. Thus began a series of experiments that gave us yeast and sourdough today, thousands of years later.

Sourdough and bread made with beer barm, (the yeast 'overflow' that rises to the top of fermenting beer or mead and obtained from the dregs when the beer is racked) were staple foods for the next 5000 years. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that commercial yeast was introduced by Charles Fleischmann at the Centennial Exposition (Philadelphia, 1876). This marked the rise of modern bread making, and some would argue the decline of good flavor in our bread—think ‘Wonder bread’—as the incredibly complex flavors of sourdough and the techniques used by our great grandparents disappeared beneath the increasingly busy schedule of the modern family.

There are hundreds of strains of yeast and all give different flavors to bread. Wouldn’t you like to make a loaf of bread made with the yeast native to Egypt? Bread that would taste very much like the one you served to pharaoh all those many years ago. Since my pet was given to me, I have made innumerable loaves of breads, a batch of cinnamon rolls, and loads of hotcakes. I’m still learning…experimenting with ingredients, rise times, and reconnecting to the breads made by my great grandmothers. I don’t have a recipe for you but here are several links I’ve found helpful in my own explorations. If you don’t want to hassle with making bread yourself, I would at least encourage you to visit an artisan bakery and experience the wonder of great bread made the old fashioned way.

Sourdoughs International : a good place to get starters from around the world
Sourdoughbreads.com: starters, instructions, and recipes
The Basics
History of Bread Yeast