Dueling Bread Bakes

Are you making banana bread this weekend?

I'm asking because it seems like everyone's quarantine bananas went past ripe at the same time this week, since five people I know were making banana bread yesterday. I found out because I was also making banana bread yesterday, and when I mentioned it in texts or on social media, everyone else chimed in. My friend Kathryn and I compared recipes, and ended up both using the same one, a basic, easy to follow recipe from the Food Network. Kathryn decided to put chocolate chips in hers, and I opted not to, but other than that we both followed the same recipe.

When we compared breads, though, an odd thing happened.

Kathryn's bread:



is much lighter in color than my bread:



Both of us were very intrigued by this, so we started comparing notes.

Pan: Kathryn used a metal pan, and I used a vintage glass Pyrex pan. I don't have any metal loaf pans, and Kathryn doesn't have any glass ones.

Baking time: I baked mine for an hour and ten minutes, and Kathryn baked hers for an hour.

Cooling time: Kathryn cooled hers for fifteen minutes in the pan, then for 45 minutes on a cooling rack. I cooled mine for an hour in the pan.

Other than those three things, we couldn't spot any other differences, so today we turned to our friend Stacy, a much better and more experienced baker than me and, possibly, Kathryn. (I don't want to say for sure that Stacy is a better baker than Kathryn because I've never directly compared, so we'll just say she's better than me and leave it there.) Stacy offered the following ideas:

1) Different baking times are definitely a factor.

2) Even though we both set our ovens to what we think is the same temperature, our ovens are not precisely calibrated, and there may actually be differences. This never occurred to me, but it makes sense.

3) One of us may have had riper bananas, which would have more sugar.

4) The chocolate chips increased the volume of Kathryn's loaf, so we should have had different baking times. Stacy thinks Kathryn should have had a longer baking time, not a shorter one, which could support the idea that our oven temperatures are a little different, or raises the possibility that mine may actually be a little bit overbaked. (I raised that possibility. Stacy did not.)

Both of us agree that our bread tastes good, but we both live alone, so there are no second opinions.

You'll have to take our word for it.

"Gotta use up this flour..."

Back at the beginning of the month, which seems an incredibly distant time in light of current circumstances but turns out to be less than 30 days ago, I baked a fancy banana bread for my friends. They enjoyed it, and ate it all, but it used up almost all of the flour I had in the house. I added flour to my grocery list without a second thought, but that was the week when Knoxville decided to start panic buying, and it has taken until this past Wednesday to have flour in stock at Kroger again.

The last bag of flour.

It turned out to be a 5 pound bag, which is larger than my flour cannister will hold. I'm sure there are people who just sit the bag of flour in their cabinet and think nothing of it, but I'm always worried that if I leave the flour just sitting in the bag then bugs of some kind (weevils? mites? centipedes, which are not a bug but are an arthropod?) will get into it, even though I've never seen a bug in my kitchen. Unwilling to leave this flour just sitting out as an insect buffet after I waited almost a month to be able to buy it, I decided that I would use it up this weekend instead.

The first thing I made was scones. I've been using the same scone recipe since 2011, but my recipe is for pear and goat cheese scones, and I didn't have any pears in the house. I did have an apple, though, so I decided on apple cheddar scones instead.

I chunked up my apple:



peeled and finely diced it, and lumped everything into my scone batter:



and baked them. I didn't bother shaping them, and instead just made them like haystacks of dough:



and they came out fine.

That didn't use up enough flour, though, so I thought about what else I could make, and decided on a quick bread. Years ago, Food Network Magazine published a 50 Quick Breads recipe guide in the magazine, and I've never gone wrong using it. I looked around the pantry and saw half a bag of dried figs leftover from when I made a flatbread with figs on it and an almost empty bottle of honey (I had a spare right behind it), so I decided to make the honey bread (number 30) and add the figs to it. Calling this a bread is misleading, though, because it's really a fig and honey poundcake.

The batter came together quickly and fairly easily, and then I decided to try something new. Every time I make a bread with things in it, most of the things sink to the bottom. I've seen people on Food Network talk about how you have to toss your add ins in flour, so that they suspend in the dough rather than sinking, but I've never actually tried it. I saved back an eighth of a cup of the flour that was supposed to go into the batter and tossed the diced figs in it:



The figs were folded into the batter, the batter went into the loaf pan:



(Look! You can see figs floating near the top!) and it worked:



Fig and honey bread with figs in pretty much every bite. I can't really taste the honey, but I can taste the figs, and I love figs, so this is delicious. Next time I have dinner at a friend's house I might even bring this as dessert.

I figured this was enough baking, and decided to pause until Sunday.

This morning I was originally planning to make chocolate chip cookies, but they called for a lot of eggs, and I was worried about using up too many eggs in one weekend. I also used a crap ton of butter this weekend between the baking and a lemon pasta dish, but I had extra butter in the freezer, so I wasn't as worried about that. Changing gears, I decided to make shortbread cookies instead, because I've made them once before, they use the same amount of butter and flour as the chocolate chip cookies, and they only use one egg.

I couldn't remember what recipe I used when I made these before, but a quick google search turned up this really easy one, and it mostly worked with one minor snag.

After mixing up the dough:



I went to eject the mixer blades so I could get the dough out of them, and I accidentally hit spin instead. Little pieces of dough, all over the counter and the stove:



I guess it got mixed a little more than I intended it to.

I got the dough back together in the bowl, pressing it into a ball with my hands, and then dumped it onto my floured countertop. Learning from my recent troubles with piecrust I floured my rolling pin and rolled the dough out to the right thickness. Once that was done, I used my hands to shape it into a square to cut out evenly sized cookies:



I cut them into triangles and got them to the cookie sheet with a minimum of trouble, then separated an egg to make an egg white wash for the top:



The recipe said to put sanding sugar on top, but I didn't have any. I did have leftover gold colored sugar from making Unicorn Fudge a few years ago, so I used that instead, and it actually came out really pretty:



It's sparkly and shiny, and gave the tops a nice crunch.

Tomorrow night, I'll probably make some banana bread, because I have bananas to use up, too.

A Greek Tragedy on Pi Day

So many of the best Greek tragedies, and really tragedies in general, rest on the idea of hubris. Generally one thinks of hubris, if one thinks of it at all, as a folly of youth, but I'm here to tell you a tale of hubris from yesterday morning, starring me and a pie crust.

Our story begins, as so many do, with a tiny act. See, a few months ago I bought my friend a Harry Potter spatula at Williams Sonoma, and let them email my receipt rather than printing a paper one. Since that day, I receive one to three emails from Williams Sonoma a day telling me about sales and reasons why I should rush to their store to by four hundred dollar toasters and hundred dollar mixing bowls. Yesterday morning, for Pi Day, they sent me one about "6 Pie Essentials", which I casually deleted and then tweeted about.

Thanks for your thoughtful email, Williams Sonoma, but I don't really need 6 pie-making essentials right now.

Please email when you have toilet paper.

The stage is now set to move on with our story.

Around lunch time yesterday, after a morning of cleaning, laundry, reading, and video games, I realized that I didn't have any pie to celebrate Pi Day. I thought about running to the store to pick up a small one, but then remembered that I'm supposed to be practicing social distancing right now, and trying to stay in my apartment instead of running out to the store whenever the impulse hits me.

"What if I just made a pie?" I thought, surveying the contents of my cabinets. Mixed in with a dozen boxes of Jello, I noticed a box of instant chocolate pudding and pie filling. "All I need, really, is a pie crust. People make pie crust all the time. How hard can it be? I mean, I own a hundred cookbooks. One of them must have a recipe."

So, hours after casually mocking the idea that there are pie essentials that I might need help with (making pie crust is probably one of them), I decide to make a pie.

Hubris.

Now, on with our tragedy. I started by surveying the book case where I keep most of my cookbooks:



My parents got that bookcase as a wedding gift. It has survived a dozen moves over the years, and the only damage is a chip in the corner of one of the sliding door panels. It holds most of my cookbooks, although there is a shelf of overflow cookbooks in the second bedroom, which I sometimes grandly refer to as The Library. I picked through for a few minutes, and found a basic recipe for pie crust. I had all the ingredients, so I preheated the oven and got started on the pie crust.

The recipe said that the butter needed to be really cold, so I cubed it and then put it in the freezer for ten minutes:



Then I prepared to cut the butter into the flour and salt:



After adding the ice cold water, the recipe insisted that I now had pie dough.



It didn't look like pie dough. It looked like a pile of sad ruins, but I had now used butter and flour on it during our time of social distance, which meant I shouldn't waste it to just make pudding. I soldiered onward, and followed the instructions, which said to roll out my dough.



The recipe gave no indication that the dough could stick to the rolling pin. When I talked to my mom this morning about it she casually said, "Oh, you didn't put enough flour on your rolling pin," but the recipe didn't say to put any flour on the rolling pin. I pointed this out, and mom added, "Everyone knows you put flour on the rolling pin."

I guess everyone doesn't know, but maybe it was one of the six essential tips that I, in my hubris, deleted and mocked.

Eventually, I gave up on trying to roll out the dough, and just plopped it into the pan and pressed it into shape with my fingers.



This is not ideal pie crust.

I baked it anyway and it came out even worse.



Actual bakers are probably staring at that in horror, but I was all in at this point. I waited for it to cool, then filled it with my newly mixed chocolate pie filling and put it in the fridge. The finished product looked mostly like a pie, with sloppy edges.



It sliced right up, though:





and it tastes fine.

It would probably taste a little better if I'd followed those six essential pie tips, though.

Books and Baking Banana Bread for Brunch

Earlier in the week I saw this recipe for chocolate peanut butter banana bread, and was intrigued. I shared it to Facebook, and the reaction from my friends ranged between also intrigued and concerned. My friend Sean expressed doubt about the flavor combination, and I pointed out that peanut butter and banana sandwiches were Elvis' favorite.

And also killed him.

Technically, that's probably more the fault of the sandwich preparation than it is the fault of the flavor combination. After all, according to the potholders for sale at the Graceland gift shop, every sandwich took an entire stick of butter.



That's why Elvis is dead. Four or five sticks of butter a day.

Anyway, by a happy coincidence I had some friends coming in from out of town this weekend, and they rented an entire house from Airbnb and invited many of us to brunch today. This offered the perfect opportunity to bake the bread but then not have the bread hanging around my house waiting to be eaten all week, so this morning I got to work.

When cooking anything, I like to take out all of the ingredients first, and then put them away as I go.



I bought those bananas, the ripest ones at the store, on Wednesday so that they would be soft by this morning. After preheating the oven, I mixed up the dry ingredients:



then mashed up the bananas:



and mixed everything together:



and put it in a bread loaf pan:



and popped it into the oven for an hour.

While it's cooking, let's talk about the books I read in February, since it's also the end of the month. I only made it through two books this month, mostly because things were busy at work and I was often too tired when I got home to stay up and read.

The month started with the news that Mary Higgins Clark passed away, and I realized I had Death Wears a Beauty Mask on my shelf of unread books. It's a short story collection featuring the title novella and other stories, some of which are interesting, but some of which seem like they could have used a little more work. Overall, the collection was a mixed bag, but reading it still felt like a nice sendoff to a beloved author. I've been reading Mary Higgins Clark's books since I was in high school, when I received several of them in a box of books my grandmother gave me. While my library has been a little pared down over the years, I still have all of those.

The other book I read this month was a reread of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, one of my all time favorite books in the world. Throughout the month of February I tried to figure out if I was rereading the book because I was melancholy, or if I was melancholy because I was reading the book, but that may be an unanswerable question.

Enough about books, though, because the bread was done:



I think I might need to lower the racks in my oven, because the top of that is really brown and I think it might be too close to the heating element. By the time I got it to the house and sliced it, though, it seemed fine:



and my friends ate all of it.

I brought home an empty loaf pan.

The Pyrex Bake-A-Round

I've not been very successful with bread baking in the past. My friends are. My friends make beautiful bread, and post photos of it, and I help to cheer their accomplishments, but inside I am secretly jealous.

Why can't I make bread? I think, gazing longingly at my oven. What's wrong with me?

The obvious answer, that I'm clearly descended from aristocracy rather than bread baking peasant stock and am therefore genetically predisposed to have others make bread for me, offers little comfort as I stare at small, salty, dismal loaves produced and quickly disposed of in my kitchen. I tried to address this problem earlier this year, using a kit, but met with only partial success.

That's why I was so excited the other day to find a happy collision of my Pyrex hobby and my cooking hobby:



The Pyrex Bake-A-Round, produced in the 1970's and possibly into the 1980's. The Bake-A-Round isn't particularly sought after by collectors, and is often found (like mine) in the box, but it was only three dollars, it wasn't broken, and the original instructions were still inside, so I figured it was worth a try. How could my bread possibly get any worse?

I assembled all of my tools and ingredients:



(At this point my friend Heather is looking at that Pyrex bowl and saying, "Old Orchard? You hate Old Orchard." It was a gift.)

The Bake-A-Round instructions said that I could use any bread recipe, so I figured that I would just try the mix again, since it was partially successful. I started activating my yeast in warm faucet water, and then set about greasing the inside of the Bake-A-Round, which is easier said than done:



Fortunately, the instructions said to start at one end and grease toward yourself. They also said not to use oil, which is why I didn't just spray the inside of the tube with cooking spray. I was kind of terrified that if I used spray the glass tube would explode in my oven, so I followed the instructions, and greased the hell out of that thing:



Then I got to work on the bread. The Bake-A-Round instructions said to shape your loaf on waxed paper, so I did:



I then realized that the loaf had to fit inside the Bake-A-Round, and therefore had to be longer and skinnier, rather than rounded, so I had to shape it again. Then, following the instructions, I slid the waxed paper into the tube:



The next step was a minor disaster. The Bake-A-Round instructions say to slide the dough to the middle of the tube, then turn it upside down, and the dough will fall off of the waxed paper, which you then slide out.

The hell it does.

If you ever have a Bake-A-Round of your own, grease the waxed paper, too.

After a lot of shaking and cursing, I extricated the waxed paper from the tube and tried to shake the dough back toward the center:



At this point you cover the ends of the tube with foil, then put it in the holder and leave it somewhere warm to rise. This has been a problem with my bread baking in the past. My apartment doesn't have a spot warm enough, usually. This time, though, I set the oven on "warm" and put the whole thing inside...

AND IT WORKED.



Look how much bigger the bread got! It rose! Never again will hunchbread shame my kitchen!

Excited, I warmed up the oven (which needs cleaning; don't judge) and slide the Bake-A-Round inside for baking:



I ignored it through the entire baking process, although I did keep an ear open for the sound of exploding glass. I didn't get an oven full of glass and bread dough, though.

I got a somewhat attractive loaf of bread:



It's round, and crusty, and soft and airy on the inside:



It's bread.

And I made it.

The Baker

Remember that time I made bread from scratch and it turned out to be a terrible nightmare loaf of horrors and sadness, and I swore, as God is my witness, I'd never bake bread again?

Well, I decided not to give up just yet, because I saw a commercial for this:



"Just add water!", the box says.

"Anyone can be a baker!", the commercial says.

I'm not just anyone, you know. I can screw up a kit or a mix like you wouldn't believe, no matter how hard I try to follow directions. Just ask the (in)Famous Fudge Kit, ruiner of Christmas for four years running. We'll see if anyone can be a baker, Fleischmann's. Oh, we'll see.

According to the directions I needed a large bowl. If there's one thing that's never in short supply around here, it's a large mixing bowl. I settled on my extra Pyrex Verde 403, because it was the right size and it matched the box:



I don't know that matching the box helps, but I also don't know that it doesn't help. Maybe it increases kitchen harmony.

Side note: I have an extra Verde 403 because I bought it separately at a yard sale. Then, later, I got all four of the Verde round mixing bowls for a really good price, so now I have one 403 in the display and one in the cabinet until I drop it on the floor and murder it or I happen to pick up the other pieces and end up with two sets.

Anyway, back to the bread and away from the Pyrex ramblings. The back of the box suggested some mix ins. I didn't want to go all out, but I figured since it was herb bread anyway, maybe some extra herbs would create some more harmony. I want that kitchen filled with good vibrations, damn it. I settled on a teaspoon of herbes de Provence:



because I know from past experience that they smell so effing good, and I want this to be the effing goodest loaf of bread ever.

With everything ready, and a silent prayer to Flour Jesus, I began to bake.

First, I mixed the yeast and sugar in my bowl:



I immediately added hot, but not boiling, water and stirred:



So far, everything seemed good. I consulted the instructions again, and was told to let the bowl sit for three minutes so that the yeast could activate. I would know it activated when it was "foamy". I set the timer, curated my social media for a few minutes, and returned to the bowl when the bell rang.

This is what I saw:



Not what I would call "foamy", but something definitely happened while I was gone. There were bubbles, and as I watched the bowl I saw movement, little puffs forming in the water. I decided that it was bubbling, and foam is made of bubbles, so maybe everything was ok.

The next step was to add the bread mix and mix ins, and to stir until a ball formed. I was warned by the box that dough may be stiff, which was an understatement:



That wooden spoon is standing straight up. I'm not touching the other end.

I was then instructed to put the dough on a greased baking sheet. Last time I did this I put it on a sheet of parchment paper on the sheet, but this time I decided to do exactly what I was told and to grease a cookie sheet until it God damned glistened in the kitchen light. The box said anyone could make bread, and I want to be anyone.



And yeah, my cookie sheets are stained, but it's because they're old. Stop judging me.

The box suggested using a teaspoon of flour on the top of the loaf to make it easier to shape, so I measured out exactly a teaspoon and tried to make my blob round:



I tried. It's not perfect. I then covered it with a dishtowel and left it to rise for 25 minutes.

It did not rise.

Oh, it got bigger:



but it's like me after college. It keeps getting wider, but not any taller. I didn't think I could do anything to change that, so I threw the pan in the oven, set the timer, and hoped for the best.

This is what happened:



Also, my kitchen and living room smelled wonderful, like a French bakery. I imagine it's how the village smells when Belle sings "Bonjour" in the beginning of "Beauty and the Beast", although it's much more likely that the village smells like farm animals, overripe cheese, and unwashed French peasants.

I went for some butter, and sliced off a piece:



And it's not bad. It's a little tiny bit doughy, and mine isn't nearly as tall as the one on the box. Maybe my apartment isn't warm enough? The box said I should let it rise in a warm, draft free place, but maybe my place wasn't as warm as it should be? Maybe I should have waited for more foam? Maybe my initial water wasn't hot enough? Maybe I should have waited for more foam? Who knows, really?

What's important is that I made bread.

I am anyone.