Impromptu Banana Bread

The secret to banana bread is to measure the amount of mashed banana you have. Since this interesting fellow

somehow magically refused to freeze during his night in the freezer, and then squirted out of its sausage case-like peel the consistency of baby food, I had no choice but to make banana bread immediately. Poor me.

This is why you always keep the recipe handy, with the half and quarter recipes already written out. Or you just memorize it. :)

Granola Bars

Like (almost) everything else, this was an experiment. It was partially successful.

Like experiments, there were multiple conditions--two different methods of trying to make the granola bars stick together. One worked better than the other, but neither worked well. The mix was: 2 c rolled oats, 1/3 c wheat germ, 1/3 c wheat bran, 2 tbsp sunflower seeds, 2 tbsp sliced almonds, 3 tbsp brown sugar, 1.5 tbsp ground flaxseed, 2 tbsp melted butter, 1 tsp vanilla. A trick I learned from the KAF blog is to everything in a different place as a visual check of what you've added so you don't forget anything.

I mixed all this good stuff up and then split the batch in half. One half got a beaten egg white, the other 3 tbsp mashed banana. (This was based on a lack of critical thinking, as usual: I somehow managed to reason that since egg holds stuff together and is also something that adds moisture, something else that holds moisture should also hold things together. Don't ask.) Each half got pressed into a loaf pan. (Below, I think the egg version was the full one.)

After 25? minutes at 350 and 7 minutes to cool in the pan, I turned each out on the cutting board. The egg pan stuck together better than the banana pan, but neither stuck particularly well. I also realized that sunflower seeds don't really belong in granola bars. It's too bad but I've become quite a fan of the processed "food", sugar, oats, and chocolate chip version.

So, who has a granola bar recipe to share that doesn't have loads of sugar for holding everything together?

A Perfect Loaf of Bread

Double batch. Absolutey unbeatable. In fact, I should quit right now, because nothing will ever top this. SO worth every once of sweat!

Experimental (Moosewood) Banana Bread

In retrospect, I don't know why this seemed like a good idea, but I was having a brief spell of actually being able to follow recipes, so I decided to give the Moosewood recipe for banana muffins a shot.

It looked innocent enough to begin with, and actually tasted fairly good.

It was similar to my normal recipe, but had a whole egg, and egg white, and half a cup of yogurt (= sour milk). It turned out to be, predictably, wayyy too moist. I may need to continue the experiment and put it back in the oven.... It still looked innocent, and oats on top are super cute. I loved the cracks in the top of the loaf.

Moral of the story: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Because It Wasn't Hot Enough

The plan was to make bread on the weekends. Oops.

This time, having conferred with a professional bread baking person, things worked much better. I used less water, and therefore less flour, slightly less yeast, and baked the bread at 400 instead of 350. I also kneaded it less, because 20 minutes, besides being REALLY hard sweaty work, might have been overdoing it. Most exciting, I finally got loaf pans! The loaf wasn't as *big* as I wanted, but I can attribute this to the size of the recipe since it was the perfect consistency.

And because of the loaf pans (I think having direct metal contact makes a difference) and the increased temperature, it was darker than before. So pretty!

And then, since the apartment wasn't hot enough, I decided the time had come to make granola! (Since I sillyily mistook granola for granola bars, that'll be happening soon too. Stay tuned!) Here's the mountain of granola; it reminds me of Vesuvius, in, maybe, 78 A.D.

Here's the recipe. As with most things, it's my rendition of a recipe I found somewhere among teh interwebs.

in bowl:
2 c rolled oats
1/2 c wheat bran (actually a bit more)
1/2 c wheat germ (actually a bit less)
1/3 c sunflower seeds (this was too much!)
1/3 c sliced almonds
3/4 tsp cinnamon (could be more)
1/2 tsp salt (probably unnecessary)

in pan:
3 tsp brown sugar
3 tsp water
2 tbsp butter
1/4 c honey

boil syrup, pour over dry stuff
spread in greased jelly roll pan and bake at 350 for 25? minutes

In the future, I'm going to try using a combination of applesauce and/or mashed banana instead of the oil.

I eat it as cereal, but you can also mix it with cottage cheese, yogurt, or make parfait!

Also pretty!

One Hot Night (Part 1 - Bread)

They say it tastes better if you have to fight for it. Let's add, or sweat your brains out for it. I was perfectly justified in skipping the gym the next day (especially after biking 40 miles over the course of the weekend, getting happily soaked)!

Even though the temperature outside was having a race with the temperature in the oven (thankfully it never quite caught up!), not having sandwich bread is not really acceptable. While I was at it, I decided to make a loaf of white Italian bread to eat with pasta. It took a lot of self-restraint to not put in all sorts of extra healthy stuff like I do for the "normal" bread. I found a very simple recipe (2.33 c flour, 1 c water, 1 tsp yeast, 1 tsp salt, 0.25 tsp sugar) online and added a few tablespoons of dried basil to the dough. Here it is being slathered with olive oil before the first rise:

It rose like crazy. Here's before and after being punched down:

It went crazy again during the second rise:

(It rises under a wet towel so the outside doesn't dry out. The oil on the pan is to keep it from sticking and to give it a golden bottom.)

(It also sprouted dried basil on top! How did that happen!?)

One of the great things about finding recipes online is you get the added wisdom of the commenters. I learned this way to take the bread out of the oven (no happy feat, considering it was 450!) every two minutes for the first 10 minutes of cooking to add water. This colors the crust and also keeps it from forming too soon, and reducing oven spring. At first I didn't think it was working and almost gave up, but the crust came out beautifully rustic.

I was even more speechless tasting it than looking at it!

P.S. I also made a loaf of my hearty whole wheat bread for sandwiches. After kneading it, the Italian bread was practically zero effort to knead; I had never kneaded bread so white so I didn't know what a big difference all the whole wheat flour, bran, flaxseed, etc. has on the toughness of the dough. I love the smell, color, and texture of the dough ball.

(In the lower left corner, you can see the strands of gluten. The finished bread was full of them. Anyone know what that means? I'm wondering if it could have risen more - it was extremely dense, but yummy and filling!

The Best Bread

I make the best bread. (Feel free to disagree, just save us both the time by not telling me if you do.) This is the perfect bread for sandwiches, nutrition, taste, and eating with soup, and for facendo la scarpetta. :) Such a pleasure to eat plain, with butter, soup, gnats from the hot weather, anything.

wheat loaf

1.5 water

1 tbsp oil

3 tbsp brown sugar

2 tsp salt

2 c whole wheat flour

1.5 c total your combination of wheat bran, wheat germ, rolled oats, ground flaxseed, cornmeal
(I used 1 c oats, 1/2 c bran, germ, flaxseed)

1/2 c vital wheat gluten

Notes:
- Proof the yeast in 1/2 very warm water with a pinch of white sugar. Be careful when mixing the wet ingredients that you only add 1 c water (not 1.5) because the half cup used to proof the yeast counts.
- Add flour when kneading if dough is too wet, but be careful not to add too much. I found that if I kneaded very quickly and really kept the dough moving it wouldn't stick.

• After mixing, knead 20 minutes, slather with olive oil, and leave at 80-90 degrees F to rise (if it doesn't quite double in size it's ok); shape, slather with oil again, let rise, and bake a bit below 340 until done.

white(r) loaf

(I mean this to be super white artisan-type Italian bread, but added too much wheat germ and wheat bran and it ended up almost whole wheat)

1 c water + 3 tbsp

1 tbsp oil

2 tbsp white sugar

1.5 tsp salt

2.25 tsp yeast

3 c total flour, oats, wheat germ, wheat bran, wheat gluten, flaxseed, etc.  
(I used I think 1.75 c all-purpose flour, 1/2 c wheat germ, 1/2 c wheat bran, 1/4 c wheat gluten.)

For more information on the bread-baking process, visit

http://wallacecookingcircle.blogspot.com/2010/05/bread-baking-extravaganza.html