Category: Breads and Pancakes

Quick and Easy Baguettes

More than anything else, seeing a bicyclist with a shopping bag hanging from the handlebars and a three foot long loaf of bread under her arm convinced me that, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I was not in Kansas anymore. Or in my case, no longer in Wisconsin.

People do not carry unwrapped loaves of bread under their arms in Wisconsin, certainly not while riding bicycles, but it is still a common sight in Europe. The longest loaves I saw were in Paris, France, but nearly every baker at the market in Münster, Germany, where I was a student, had a bin filled with long skinny loaves that gave me another reason to call bread “the staff of life.”

These long loaves are called baguettes. In French the word means simply baton or wand, so the conductor at a concert uses a baguette de direction to lead the orchestra and the magician waves his baguette magique over the scarf-covered top hat to make the rabbit appear.

You can make your own magic wands with just flour, water, yeast and salt, though I like to add a fifth ingredient, a pinch or two of sugar, to encourage the yeast. When your loaves are done, you can entertain your family and guests by waving a baguette over the table before you cut it into pieces and pass the butter, cheese or herbed olive oil. Once they taste the new bread, they will applaud you as the “kitchen magician.”

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/4 cups warm water
1/4 tsp. sugar
2 1/4 tsp. yeast (1 package)
About 3 cups bread flour
1 tsp. salt
Cooking spray
Cornmeal

PROCEDURE:

Heat the water until it feels warm but not hot when you sprinkle a drop or two on the inside of your wrist, just as if you were testing the contents of a baby bottle. Put the water in a mixing bowl, and stir in the sugar and yeast. Let the yeast proof for five to ten minutes until it begins to foam.

Put a cup of bread flour into the liquid and stir it well. Repeat with the second cup of flour, at which point the mixture will be a thick batter. Now add flour a quarter cup at a time, stirring thoroughly between each addition. On average you will need to add a little more than three-quarters of a cup of flour to end up with a soft but firm dough. It is better to have a dough that is slightly too soft, since you will add more flour while kneading.

Cover the bowl with a damp kitchen towel and let it stand in a warm, draft-free place for half an hour. The dough will rise noticeably in this time, since you have not added any salt, which retards yeast growth. Scrape the dough from the bowl on to a lightly floured work surface. It will be a little sticky. Use a spatula to turn the dough and flatten it a bit. Sprinkle a half teaspoon of salt on it. Fold the dough, turn it once again and sprinkle on another half teaspoon of salt.

Knead the dough for five to six minutes until it is smooth and elastic, keeping your hands and the work surface lightly floured. Kneading distributes the salt through the dough and of course gives you that nice bread texture. Form the dough into a ball.

Coat the inside of the mixing bowl with cooking spray and roll the ball of dough in the bowl to lightly grease the surface. Cover with the damp towel and let the dough rise until it has doubled in volume, usually forty-five minutes to an hour.

Sprinkle a light coating of cornmeal on a baking sheet. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface. Divide the dough into thirds and form each piece into a rope a little over an inch in diameter and twelve to fourteen inches long with tapered ends. Put the ropes on the prepared baking sheet, coat them lightly with cooking spray and cover them with a damp towel. Let them rise until they have doubled in size, usually about half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 450º.

When the loaves have doubled in size, use a very sharp knife to cut three or four diagonal slits about a quarter inch deep on the top of each loaf. Bake on the center shelf for eighteen to twenty minutes until the loaves are light brown and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.

NOTES: If you want a crispier crust, you can toss three or four ice cubes into a preheated baking pan on the bottom shelf in the oven when you start baking the baguettes. I sometimes do this when I make Italian Feather Bread, but so far I have been happy with baguettes baked without the ice cubes.

Mrs. Deckert’s Hawaiian Banana Bread

My mother’s recipe box has a lot of banana bread recipes in it. Since I like numbers and facts, I was going to count them today. However, I abandoned that project after looking at the third card in the box. It was a recipe for Hawaiian Banana Bread that had no pineapple, macadamia nuts or coconuts. I was intrigued. Why call it Hawaiian?

Mom’s note said “Patsy’s from Mrs. Deckert. Very good.” So I grabbed the cell phone and called my sister.

After telling her of my aborted banana bread counting project I asked, “Why do you call it Hawaiian?”

“That’s what Mrs. Deckert called it,” she said. “I don’t know why she did, but it’s our favorite banana bread. You should try it.”

She explained how she got the recipe. “When we were first married, we bought a house in Northwoods Beach south of Hayward. Mrs. Deckert lived across the road and next to the town hall across from our house. She was the nicest little old lady. She had a strong German accent and came over to welcome us when we moved in. She brought us a loaf of her Hawaiian Banana Bread. I asked for her recipe and later gave it to Mom. Mrs. Deckert used to bring us Kuchen too. It was delicious but I never got that recipe.”

Bananas do grow in Hawaii, so maybe that explains the name.

Too lazy to go back to my recipe counting project, I decided to see how many banana bread recipes would show up on a search of the Internet. The answer is, A LOT. Even more than recipes for zucchini bread, a notoriously prolific squash that frugal cooks desperately keep trying to use up every summer.

My Google search returned about 3,260,000 results for zucchini bread but over 7,750,000 for banana bread. If each banana bread recipe were written on a standard three by five-inch recipe card and laid end to end, you could mark the route all the way from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Rapid City, South Dakota with enough cards left over to guide you most of the way to Mount Rushmore.

The zucchini bread cards would run out at Sioux Falls.

This is another really easy recipe. Just cut the shortening into the dry ingredients before folding in the banana and eggs. No electric mixer and just a little stirring. Here is what you do.

INGREDIENTS:

1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
3 ripe bananas
2 large eggs

PROCEDURE:

Preheat the oven to 350º and mash enough bananas to fill a measuring cup. Grease and flour two bread loaf pans.

Sift the flour, sugar, salt and baking soda into a mixing bowl. With a pastry blender or table fork, cut the shortening into the dry ingredients until it looks like coarse corn meal. This is like the first step in making pie crust.

Beat the eggs in a small bowl until they are lemon-colored. Fold the mashed bananas and eggs into the flour mixture until everything is moist and put half of the batter into each pan.

Set the pans on the center shelf in the oven and bake for thirty to forty minutes. Check for doneness at thirty minutes. A toothpick inserted near the center of the bread should come out clean.

Remove the pans from the oven and let them stand for about six minutes to cool slightly. Then loosen the loaves and transfer them to a rack to finish cooling.

NOTES: Patsy says that you can bake this bread in one standard loaf pan if you want. Extend the baking time to an hour and test for doneness before taking it from the oven.

Frugal shoppers watch for discounted bananas at the supermarket. Produce managers often reduce the price on bananas starting to get brown streaks on the peel as they ripen. If you want bananas to peel and eat raw, buy ones with little or no brown on them, but if you want to make banana bread, pick ones that are turning brown or take yellow bananas home and let them ripen on the counter. They get sweeter and sweeter.

This recipe produces two five by nine-inch loaves a little more than an inch thick. Maybe because you cut the shortening into the dry ingredients, the bread is a bit darker than most banana breads, but it is delicate and flavorful.