Cookbook #155: Healthy Bread Recipes, Salton/MAXIM Housewares, Inc., Mt. Prospect, IL, 1998.

Healthy Bread Recipes reminds me that I purchased a Breadman breadmaker around 1998. My second breadmaker, it was highly recommended by King Arthur Flour. I recall that it eventually died – a problem with the dough bucket paddles binding up. I replaced it with another Zojirushi in 2008. The Breadman brand is currently owned by Spectrum Brands Inc. I wrote about my thoughts on yeast breads and breadmachines in the post My Daily Bread.

Healthy Bread Recipes has less than 20 recipes. But since they all have whole grains and are designed for breadmakers, each recipe is right up my alley. I’ll keep this booklet.

I decide to make “Honey Banana Whole Wheat Bread” for this blog. I’ve made banana yeast breads before, but don’t quite remember which recipe I used. I don’t expect the banana flavor to come through very strongly in this very wheat-y yeast bread, but I like the poppy seeds it calls for and it should be good for breakfast toast and as they say, for great peanut butter sandwiches!

Comments

This recipe calls for “1 banana”. Bananas do not come in one size! The banana I had sitting on the counter must have been bigger than they meant because I had to add almost a cup more flour to get the dough “right”. (I weighed one of its bunch-buddies and it was over 6 ounces.) With this big banana and the extra flour, my bread came out huge! It tasted great and had a good texture, but was not pretty in the pan. And it didn’t taste banana-y enought for me, even with all that banana.

Next time, I will slice the banana into a measuring cup, then add water (or milk) to 1 1/3 cup liquid volume. That’s much more scientific and should provide consistent results. And, it will have a higher banana to water ratio and perhaps more banana flavor. I’ve incorporated these changes into the directions below, but I haven’t tried this newer version yet.

Honey Banana Whole Wheat Bread

• 1 banana, sliced
• water or milk (see directions below)
• 1 1/2 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 cup (3 ounces) honey
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 9 ounces whole wheat flour (I used whole wheat, not white whole wheat)
• 7 ounces bread flour (I added a bit of gluten flour into this weight)
• 2 teaspoons poppy seeds
• 2 teaspoons yeast

Slice the banana into a 2-cup glass measure. Add water (or milk) to 1 1/3 cup volume. Dump the mixture into your bread machine. Add all of the remaining ingredients.

Choose a dough cycle that kneads and takes the dough through the first rise cycle. Watch the dough during the kneading process and add flour or liquid if it needs it (this recipe isn’t perfected yet!).

Remove the dough from the machine and form into a loaf. Place in a 9×5-inch loaf pan. Bake at 375˚ for 30-35 minutes. (When I baked my loaf, I used an instant-read thermometer and when the bread looked brown and done, it tested to 190˚.)

This bread is very good! I won’t say excellent (yet) because I want more banana flavor, I’m hoping my suggested revisions will do the banana flavor trick. (Adding dried banana chips might help too.)

Honey Banana Whole Wheat Bread is excellent in peanut butter sandwiches. And it’s good for toast. It might be kind of weird in deli meat sandwiches, but go ahead and experiment.

An even better idea for this bread is: French toast! I used Honey Banana Whole Wheat Bread to make French toast this week liked it so much that I’ll make this bread again just for the delicious treat.

Cookbook #144: The Best Bagels are Made at Home, Dona Z. Meilach, Bristol Publishing Enterprises, San Leandro, CA, 1995.

I am quite proud of my homemade bagels. Below is a 2012 photo of my “Basic New York Water Bagels“, my most-used recipe in The Best Bagels are Made at Home. I’ve made these tons of times! I modified the recipe just a bit, and will share it with you in a different post.

These bagels are lighter than store- or shop-bought bagels and absolutely wonderful.

Bagels are made from a yeast dough. They take a few more steps than a basic loaf of bread: instead of just slapping the dough into a bread pan and then the oven, you have to divide it into pieces, form each piece into a bagel, boil each in hot water, and glaze with an egg mixture and topping. Only then do they go into the oven.

But note: I have taken the time to make these many, many times. It’s worth it!

Who taught me how to make bagels? I learned from this cookbook. Dona Meilach clearly explains all the steps in bagel-making. I had tried to make them a few times before I got this cookbook, but met only with miss-shapen masses of baked dough – I found forming the dough into a bagel shape nearly impossible. Luckily I bought this book, studied and practiced, and now can make these any time I want!

Meilach begins with a little bagel history. What we know as the American bagel came with the Polish immigration in the late 1800s, and were popular among the Polish Jews who settled in New York. Between 1910 and 1915, the Bagel Bakers’ Local #338 union was formed. Apprentices of this union eventually moved to different parts of the US, and the popularity of bagels spread. (In one of my own 1941 cookbooks, The Bread Basket, I found a recipe for “bagles”.) In the early 1950s, bagels were handed out at the intermission of a Broadway comedy called Bagels and Yox. Soon after, popular women’s magazines ran recipes for “bageles”. And now, bagels are an institution in the US, as we all know!

Bagel history is followed by “Directions for Making Bagels”, pages 12-31. This is an especially helpful section. The six steps of bagel making – dough mixing (bread machine encouraged) and first rise, shaping, second rise, boiling, glaze, and baking – are described in detail. Next, Meilach discusses ingredients. Of note, she advises the reader to use bread flour for its high gluten content and recommends malt syrup in bagels. Her claim is that it “helps give bagels their unique appeal, malt assists with bfowning, and feeds the yeast.” Malt syrup can be hard to find. I once bought it from a store that sold beer brewing supplies; later I found it at a health food store. Currently, I use malt powder that I buy from King Arthur Flour and supplement it with a little sugar. But you can always use molasses or sugar instead.

The bulk of this book is recipes for different bagels, about 200 different kinds! The ingredients for each variety is laid out at about one per page. Useful as it is, this organization is also a tiny bit inconvenient because the recipes themselves do not give the times for the second rise and boiling and baking or even the oven temperature. Whenever I try a new recipe from this book, I have to fish back through the first 19 pages for the necessary specifics.

Okay. Critical step in bagel preparation, shaping. Meilach describes several methods for forming bagels:

• the hole in the middle method
• the hula hoop around the finger method
• the rope method
• bagel cutter method

I tried several of these before I settled on a modification of the “hula hoop around the finger” method. Photos of how I do this are below, in the recipe that I chose for this blog, I “Oat Bran Bagels with Pumpkin Seeds and Cinnamon”.

My version is below, pretty much the same, with the complete directions included. Note that “Miller’s bran” is wheat bran – it’s not critical to the recipe so you can leave it out if you don’t have any.

Oat Bagels with Pumpkin Seeds
makes 8 bagels

• 1 1/8 cups water
• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 tablespoon sugar*
• 2 tablespoons malt powder*
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon (yes, a tablespoon! or even more if you like!)
• 1/4 cup wheat bran
• 1/4 cup cornmeal
• 1/2 cup oatmeal (I used the quick-cooking kind)
• 2 1/2 cups bread flour (10 5/8 ounces)
• 1 tablespoon gluten
• 2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
• 5/8 cup raw or roasted pumpkin seeds

*You can substitue the “1 tablespoon sugar plus 2 tablespoon malt powder” with 2 tablespoons molasses or 2 tablespoons sugar.

Combine all of the ingredients EXCEPT the pumpkin seeds in a breadmaker set on a dough cycle with a rising step. Add the pumpkin seeds when the machine “beeps” for additions, or mix them in after the bread has risen. (If you add them at the start, they will be ground to tiny bits.)

When the breadmaker cycle is done, take the dough out. Fold it a few times, then weigh it. Mine weighed 809 grams.

Divide the dough into 8 pieces – mine were about 100 grams each. (You could make 10 bagels if you want smaller bagels.) Flatten each to a circle, as shown below. I have a little flour on my breadboard in case things get sticky.

Poke a hole in the center of the flattened circle.

Now, pick up the bagel dough. You can put it on your finger and swirl it around, or put a few fingers in the center and stretch and pull and smooth the dough until it is a nice bagel shape. With one hand inside the hole, I kind of roll the bagel between my palms to smooth it. Leave a hole a bit bigger than a bagel-hole that you are used to in purchased bagels. The bagel will rise in all directions in the next steps, and the hole will get smaller.

Place the smoothed bagel on a lightly greased surface or on parchment and let rise 20-30 minutes.

My kitchen was a bit cool, and this dough has a lot of bubble-popping bran in it, so I let my bagels rise about 40 minutes.

While the bagels rise, bring a pot of water to a boil. Add a tablespoon of malt powder (or use a tablespoon of sugar). Have ready an egg wash (1 egg whisked with 1 tablespoon water) and your choice of seeds for the top (I chose poppy seeds).

Take a bagel and put it in the boiling water, flipping it so that you put the top side down (this gives smoother looking baked bagels). Set a timer and boil 30 seconds, then turn it over, add another flipped bagel, and boil another 30 seconds. Remove the first bagel and turn the second and add another – continue until all the bagels are boiled.

If the instructions in the above paragraph are hard to follow, just do this: boil each bagel 30 seconds on each side!

Set each boiled bagel on a rack. Brush with the egg wash and sprinkle with seeds.

Bake at 400˚ for 20 minutes.

I ate one right out of the oven! Boy was it good. Next day I had one with cream cheese and jam for breakfast. Deli meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato for lunch. Gotta make some more!

Cookbook #106: Bread Machine Favorites (Fleischmann’s Yeast), Copyright by Specialty Brands, a Division of Burns Philp Food Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1994. Tested in the Better Homes and Garden Test Kitchen, a registered trademark of Meredith Corporation.

This is a great cookbook. I have thumbed through it many times and it shows! I keep it with my other favorite cookbooks, near the Joy of Cooking.

I like the recipes in Bread Machine Favorites because they all work. Each recipe includes a “recommended bread machine cycle”, so they work across the different brands of bread machines. There is a great “Troubleshooting Guide” if your loaves are not turning out perfect. This guide helped me hone my bread-machine-breadmaking skills. Most importantly, I learned to watch the bread in the machine and add more water or flour as necessary. (Here is my discussion of my experience with – and love of – yeast breads.)

These are the recipes I have tried and liked in Bread Machine Favorites: Blueberry-Lemon Bread, Cottage Wheat Bread, Pumpkin-Nut Bread, Zucchini-Carrot Bread, Old-Fashioned Cinnamon Rolls, and Dried Cherry-Almond Bread. The one I used to make almost weekly is Cottage Wheat Bread. It has cottage cheese in it, therefore a little added protein and calcium. Plus it’s just a darn good whole wheat bread.

Most of the loaf recipes in this cookbook call for baking the bread in the bread machine. It is my preference to bake yeast loaves in a conventional oven. I bake a small loaf (8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches) for about 22 minutes at 385˚, or until it is nicely browned. The Bread Machine Cookbook also has recipes for rolls and braided loaves, and those are baked in a conventional oven.

About yeast. I like to know my yeast, so I buy it in two-pound packages (and I usually do not buy Fleishmann’s yeast, not that it isn’t good). By always using the same yeast, and using the bread machine to rise the loaves at a consistent temperature, I know I will get consistent results. After I acquire a two-pound package of yeast, I fill a small jar and keep it in the refrigerator, and store the rest in the freezer. Here is my discussion of bread yeast.

For this blog, I will try the “Basic Sourdough Bread”. About a year ago I purchased a sourdough starter from King Arthur Flour. Up until now, I have only used this starter to make no-knead rustic loaves. I have been very happy with the flavor and consistency of these rustic loaves loaves. They are not as sour as San Francisco sourdough bread, but I’m not sure that sort of sourness is possible in Colorado. In any case, they taste different than no-knead bread made without sourdough starter. Now I want to expand my sourdough repertoire to a kneaded loaf!

(By the way: this is the first time in my life that I have kept a sourdough starter fed and perfect for an entire year!)

Here is the sourdough recipe in Bread Machine Favorites:

I had to make a few changes in the recipe. As the bread kneaded, it was too dry, and I added at least 1/4 cup water to get the correct consistency. When I examine the “Sourdough Starter” directions in Bread Machine Favorites, I note that this cookbook directs to feed the starter with equal parts water and flour. My starter is fed with twice as much flour as water, therefore, 2 cups of flour in this recipe is too much. Below is my revised version, as well as directions for feeding my starter.

Sourdough Bread Machine Bread
makes one 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 loaf

• 3/4 cup unfed sourdough starter (see directions below)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 3/4 cups bread flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Put all the ingredients in your bread machine and set to a dough cycle, or to a basic white bread cycle with medium color (baking) setting.

If you have the bread machine do the baking, you just wait until it’s baked!

If you want to bake the bread in the oven, transfer the dough to an 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch pan. Let rise at room temperature just until the loaf peaks a half-inch over the sides of the pan. Bake for 25 minutes at 385˚.

This is great bread. The sourdough gives it a subtle flavor and soft texture. My only problem was that I used the original amount of flour and had to add more water, and ended up with a huge loaf. Honest: This loaf was just to the top of the pan when I put it in the oven, but it ballooned up on baking! Even so, the bread doesn’t have huge holes in it, nor a coarse texture. I made it Saturday and today is Wednesday and I am so looking forward to my lunch-time sandwich on this tasty, soft bread. (Note that my directions, above, incorporate my revision of using less flour so that the loaf should not rise as large.)

Sourdough starter note

My advice on sourdough starter is to get some from a friend or purchase from a reliable source. My starter is fed like this:

• remove 8 ounces or about a cup and either use it or toss it
• add 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup water and mix well
• let stand at room temperature an hour or two, until it is bubbly
• cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate
• repeat once a week, whether you are baking a sourdough loaf or not!

The directions that came with my starter say to use freshly fed starter in a recipe. However, for the bread machine sourdough loaf that I make for this blog, I used unfed (just out of the refrigerator) starter and it worked great. In fact, it almost worked too well, as the bread rose a lot in the oven, as you can see in the photo of the loaf.

Note

I have an extra copy of Bread Machine Favorites! I liked it so much that I bought a copy to give away, then forgot to.

Cookbook #104: Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery, Vol. 5, Fin-Gum. Woman’s Day, Fawcett Publications, NY, 1966.

This is the fifth in a series of 12 food encyclopedia volumes. I discussed the first four volumes here: Volume 1, Volume 2,  Volume 3, and Volume 4.

“Finland is a land where the seasons and seasonal foods are savored. The winter is long, dark, and quiet, and people stay at home, with good music, and good books. . . . Finnish cookery is Scandinavian, but simpler and more austere.”

So begins Volume 5 of the Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery. Finnish cookery is followed by a complete section on fish, which includes great photos, a fish cook book, and forty fish sauces. James Beard contributed an article to this useful fish reference. Next comes flageolet (a small green bean), flake (a small, flat, thin loose piece of food which looks like a scale”), flan, flapjack, florentine (“a cooking method which uses spinach as its base), fluke (a fish), and flummery (a dessert). Fondue! Fondues are fun. They were very popular in the seventies and eighties, and we had beef fondue just a couple weeks ago.

Forks? In the 11th century, aristocrats used the fork more as a lark than as a method of serious eating. Frankfurters? An 8-page cookbook, including a photo of frankfurters swimming in a corn-cream sauce. The “Freeze” section includes basic rules for successful home freezing.

French cookery begins with a cute illustration and an article by James Beard. Fritters, frog’s legs (“if it is necessary to dress them, cut off the hind legs close to the body and wash them well in cold water – remove feet”). Fruits, including a good section on fruit tarts. Fudge, gallantine (boned cooked meat covered with aspic, as in “gallantine of eel”), game (bear chops, roast haunch of beaver, roast coot, Maryland muskrat, woodchuck in cream). Garnishes, German cookery, ginger, ginger beer, goulash, Greek cookery (especially, baklava), greens (kale is listed as a green to cook), guinea fowl (“the habits of guinea fowl are not always admirable, they are gregarious and polygamous, they make a lot of noise and lay their eggs in a casual and haphazard manner on the ground, they resist regimentation”), and lastly, gumdrop.

What to make for this blog? Hmmm. Under German cookery, my eyes fall on “kuchen”. Oh, that’s it! The word “kuchen” is a happy one for me. I always think first of a creamy and sweet noodle kuchen, full of eggs and cinnamon. In college a Jewish friend brought this kuchen to a party. After all these years, I still remember it with longing. (Today I can find sweet noodle kuchen recipes online, and yes, they are a traditional Jewish dish.)

The kuchen in the Encyclopedia of Cookery is not made with noodles, but I am trusting my favor with the word kuchen to draw me to a good recipe. According to this encyclopedia, kuchen means “cake” in German, and to “millions of Americans, kuchen, or coffeecake, is the basis for a typical Sunday morning breakfast. Kuchen dough is not too sweet or rich; it is rather the foil for luscious toppings.”

Here is the recipe from the book:

This kuchen dough recipe has eggs and butter, but not a whole lot of sugar. I agree with the Encyclopedia: it is neither too sweet nor rich.

I decide to cut the recipe in half, and I choose the apple topping variation. Then as I made the dough, I totally goofed. I read “yeast dough” and got it in my head that I would make this in my breadmaker. I had already thrown all the dough ingredients into my breadmaker before I realized my mistake. The dough was thin! Oops. I was supposed to scald the milk and use a mixer. What the heck, I’ll go for it, and see if it works. My breadmaker has a great dough cycle where it heats all the ingredients before beginning the kneading and rising cycles. Should work.

Apple Kuchen Coffeecake
makes one 9-inch cake

• 5/8 cup milk
• 1/4 cup melted butter
• 1 egg yolk
• 1/2 egg (I whisked one egg in a glass measuring cup and used half of it)
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• a pinch of mace or cinnamon
• grated rind of 1/4 lemon (approximate)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Add all of the ingredients to the bowl of a breadmaker. Set the cycle to “dough” with “pre-heat” and “rise”. This dough is runny: it will not form a big ball of dough.

(Non-breadmaker instructions: Heat the milk and cold butter until the butter melts, cool to lukewarm. Pour into a mixer bowl and add the rest of the ingredients. Beat for 5 minutes. Cover and let rise in a warm place for about an hour.)

Pour the dough into a buttered 9-inch cake pan. Let rise for about 30-45 minutes. (It should “double in bulk” but this is kind of hard to tell.)

Top with the topping:

• 1 apple, peeled and thinly sliced
• 3/8 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon butter

Arrange the apple slices neatly on top of the risen dough.  Mix together the sugar, flour, and cinnamon and spread over the fruit.

Bake at 350˚ for 35 minutes.

Here is my kuchen after the second rising step, just before I put it in the oven:

And here it is, hot out of the oven:

This was delicious! It was good as-is, but if you like more apples on top, go for it. The original recipe says to leave the apples in quarter-apple chunks; this might be good too.

I took the above photo as soon as the kuchen came out of the oven. The real story is that as it cooled, it fell. And the falling made it even better: it had a creamy, eggy feel and sweet spicy flavor, reminding me of that noodle kuchen I had back in college.

Yum.

Cookbook #88: Bread Machine Recipes, Favorite Brand-Name Recipes, Vol. 6, March 23, 1999, No. 31, © Publications International, Ltd., 1999. I like this little recipe magazine cookbook! I bought it for myself back in 1999, and I know I have tried at least one recipe from it. Lots of fun ideas. Now that I am retired, I have more time to play with different recipes. In case you are new to my blog, I’ll tell you: I love to bake bread! This post explains my history with yeast bread.

There are so many recipes I want to try in this cookbook that I will just keep it next to my bread machine for awhile. All the recipes are from scratch, and very few “brand names” are even mentioned. Rye breads, corn breads, breads with fruits and carrots, breads cooked in muffin pans, cinnamon rolls, chocolate rolls, and pizzas galore. I like the recipe for “Savory Pull-Apart Loaves”. You make the dough, then divide it into 16 pieces, flatten them and coat with olive oil and herbs, then layer it all back together into a 9×5-inch loaf pan. Be great with a good soup or stew.

I choose to make “Jamaican Cherry Bread” for this blog. It has fresh limes and fresh ginger and tart cherries (a super food!) and coconut (I love coconut!). I like fruited yeast breads toasted for breakfast or used in peanut butter sandwiches. Here is their recipe:

The Cherry Marketing Institute, the brand name noted at the bottom of the above recipe, has more tart cherry recipes on its website.

My version of this recipe is below. I used all-purpose flour and gluten flour instead of bread flour, I used fresh ginger, and I used purchased toasted coconut chips. I baked it in the oven in a loaf pan instead of in the breadmaker.

Ginger-Cherry-Coconut Bread

• 3 1/4 cups flour (17 ounces): I used 1 1/4 ounce gluten flour and added all-purpose flour to 17 ounces; 17 ounces of bread flour would work well too
• 2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
• 1 cup milk
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons butter, cut into chunks (substitute vegetable oil if you prefer)
• 2 teaspoons freshly grated ginger root
• grated peel of one lime
• juice of one lime
• 1/2 cup dried tart cherries
• 2/3 cup coconut (use toasted shredded coconut or coconut chips)

Place all ingredients EXCEPT the cherries and coconut in your breadmaker. Set to a dough cycle, preferably one with a rise cycle. If your breadmaker has an option (a beep or an automatic feeder) to add the cherries and coconut near the end of the kneading cycle, use it. If not, you can add these ingredients at the time you form it into a loaf. Briefly, if you add the cherries and coconut too soon, the breadmaker will grind them up into tiny pieces.

When the dough/rising cycle is complete, remove the dough from the breadmaker. Add the cherries and coconut if you have not already done so. Fold over a few times and form into a loaf then place in a 9×5-inch loaf pan. Bake for 30 minutes at 385˚.

Comments

Great bread!

Below is the bread dough about 10 minutes into the kneading cycle. To me, it looked like it needed a bit more flour, but I let it go and after another 10 minutes the dough was smooth and perfect.

My breadmaker goes “beep” when it’s time to add raisins, nuts, cherries, etc. You can see it doesn’t do a great job of incorporating all of the cherries. Those ones that are poking out will just burn in the oven. I tried to get them all poked back in but it was impossible.

The photo below illustrates when it is time to put the risen loaf into the oven.

Here is the baked ginger-cherry-coconut bread:It tastes great. I like it with cream cheese and I like it with peanut butter – as toast and in a sandwich. Butter and jam would be great too. Why just eat boring store-bought toast in the morning, when you can have something really different?!

I’m kind of iffy on the use of coconut chips (big and made for granola or snacking), rather than flakes (the kind sold for baking). The chips gave a subtle crunch to the bread, but their coconut flavor was kind of washed out by the time the bread was baked. Next time I think I’ll use coconut flakes. The coconut-toasting step suggested in the original recipe might help bring out their color and flavor.

I plan to make this bread again!

Cookbook #59: Hershey’s 1934 Cookbook. Hershey Foods Corporation, USA, 1971.

I have four “Hershey’s” small cookbooks and this 1971 one is my oldest. The full title is “Hershey’s 1934 Cookbook, Revised and expanded with chocolate recipes brought up to date for use in today’s kitchen.” From the forward:

“Thirty-seven years ago, in 1934, Hershey published its own chocolate cookbook, filled with all kinds of wonderful chocolate desserts. It is from this source that many of the recipes have been taken and brought up to date for you to use today. We’ve revised some of the recipes, and added some others. Margarine wasn’t around when the first Hershey book was published. Neither were electric blenders or no-stick pans, all the things that make baking a lot easier for you than it was for your mother. Even though the method of baking has become more convenient, the end product remains essentially the same. Hershey’s test kitchens have taken painstaking care to assure the same wonderful flavor that has become a trademark of Hershey baked products throughout the years. We hope you enjoy the recipes, we hope you enjoy the book.”

The first dozen or so pages are devoted to old photos and a bit of nostalgia about the depression times: wages, the price of food, and a woman’s role in the kitchen: “nobody could bake like your mother”. It’s interesting reading. It makes me think how cooks used to have to spend hours making meals for the family, and then hours washing clothes and cleaning house. Today I can instead spend hours in the kitchen playing making flavored oils and being creative. Cooking can be now be just a hobby, not a chore.

I’ve used this cookbook for a chocolate cake recipe and as a reference when I needed to make other basic chocolate items, like chocolate sauce and brownies. I haven’t used it a lot, though, because we usually shy away from rich desserts because of calories, and when I want to make something old-fashioned and rich, I’ll look for one of my own mother’s recipes. The book is correct, nobody can bake like my mother did.

I passed over all of the rich dessert recipes and chose a recipe for a chocolate yeast bread, “Raisin-Nut Cocoa Bread”. This recipe is relatively low in fat and sugar, and is packed with the nutritional benefits of raisins (or dates), walnuts, and oatmeal. I plan to use this bread as toast for breakfasts. Ummm, should be extra good with cream cheese!

One of “all the things that make baking a lot easier for you than it was for your mother” that we have in 2014 is a breadmaker. I will use mine to knead and rise a half-recipe of this dough, then bake it in one 8 x 4-inch loaf pan. My experience tells me that this is the more appropriate size pan for this amount of dough. For the oatmeal, I will cook some of my favorite extra-thick rolled oats. To make enough for the batter, I boiled 1 1/4 cup water and added 5/8 cup oats and cooked for about 5 minutes. It makes just a little more than one cup.

Raisin-Nut Cocoa Bread
makes one 8 x 4-inch loaf

• 1 package dry yeast (2 1/2 teaspoons)
• 1/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 cup cooked oatmeal (see my note in the above paragraph)
• 1/4 cup Hershey’s Cocoa
• 3 – 3 1/4 cups flour
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts (I used walnuts)
• 1/2 cup raisins, or dates cut in small pieces (I used some of each and probably more than 1/2 cup total)

Put the yeast, water, brown sugar, butter, cooked oatmeal, cocoa, and 3 cups of the flour in the pan of a breadmaker. Set to the “dough” cycle and start the process. Watch the dough as it is kneaded and add more flour if necessary. This is a heavy dough and may take awhile to come together into a ball of dough. Add a little water if it is not sticking together.

If your breadmaker automatically adds raisins (etc.), set it up to do so. Otherwise, add the nuts and raisins (and dates) during the last five minutes of the kneading cycle.

When the dough has risen, take it out of the breadmaker and form it into a loaf and put it in the loaf pan. Let it rise in a warm kitchen about 45 minutes. This dough is heavy and will never puff up a lot.

Bake at 375˚ for 35 minutes. Take out of the pan and let cool on a wire rack.

Comments

This loaf turned out fine. It’s a dense, heavy bread, and very tasty. I had it for breakfast about four days in a row – just thinking of it made me eager to get out of bed!

Here is my loaf before the rise-in-the-pan step. Note that it is just about to the rim of the pan. I know that the raisins on the outside will burn in the baking step, so I pull a few of them off:

Here it is after about 45 minutes, risen and ready to put in the oven:

And here it is baked:

And on a rack:

No, it’s not the prettiest-looking loaf I’ve made, but it sure tastes good. Here is a slice, half with whipped cream cheese, on a plate of my Nana’s depression glassware:

Yum!