Bread Machine (203 page)

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, preferably a marble slab, and pat into a fat rectangle. With a rolling pin, roll into a 12-by-20-inch rectangle. Spread with the almond filling, leaving a 1-inch border all the way around. Sprinkle with the
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/
₄
cup chopped almonds. Roll up tightly, jelly-roll fashion, into a long 20-inch log. Sprinkle the raw sugar on the work surface and roll the log in the sugar, coating all surfaces. Roll the log back and forth with your palms to extend it to 30 inches. Place it on the baking sheet and form a circle, crossing the ends and then folding them over to touch the center of the circle on the bottom to make a pretzel. Cover loosely with a clean tea towel and let rise until puffy, about 45 minutes.

Twenty minutes before baking, preheat the oven to 375ºF.

Brush the egg glaze over the sugar and sprinkle with the sliced almonds. Bake the loaf until golden brown and firm to the touch, 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from the baking sheet and cool completely on a rack before serving.

EXPRESS LANE
BREAD

No-Yeast Quick Breads

Banana Bread

Granola Breakfast Bread

Fig Bread

Orange Poppyseed Bread with Orange Syrup

White and Dark Chocolate Tea Cake

Toasted Coconut Bread

Bourbon Nut Bread

Dried Cranberry Tea Bread

Cardamom Tea Bread

Welsh Bara Brith

Orange Gingerbread with Orange Whipped Cream

Carrot Bread

Zucchini Bread

Cornbread

Anadama Quick Bread

Q
uick breads are exceptionally popular with bakers, and it was only a matter of time before bread machine manufacturers added a cycle specifically for making them. Even after decades of professional yeast baking experience, when I am baking for myself, I often make this type of loaf. Not only do quick breads allow me to quickly assemble the ingredients from an elementary pantry, but I can include my favorite seasonal ingredients in the loaves. Supermarket shelves carry commercial mixes that I doctor to save time. A stash of quick loaves in the freezer makes last-minute breakfasts or serving tea visitors effortless.

True to their name, quick breads, which rely on the power of chemical leaveners rather than yeast to lighten their batters, require no fermentation time. The loaves are baked immediately after mixing—quick and easy. The texture of a quick bread baked in a conventional oven is created by the effect of the high heat on the baking powder and baking soda in the batter. High heat tends to create large bubbles of CO
₂
. The lower, consistent heat of the bread machine causes the leavenings to react more slowly, making smaller bubbles, and creating a bread with a tighter texture. Traditional breads like pound cakes and gingerbreads bake up beautifully in the bread machine.

Different quick bread recipes work up into different styles of batter consistency, either astonishingly thick, known as a drop batter, or thin enough to be a pour batter. They bake up to be cakelike or more like dense muffins. I have found that a medium-thick creamy batter works best in the bread machine. The loaves can range in texture from a tender pound cake to a tightly grained loaf, depending on the proportions of flour and liquid to the added embellishment. Older bread machines require the baker to mix the batter by hand outside the machine, but the new ones mix the ingredients beautifully with the action of the paddle alone; all you have to do is layer them in the pan. If yours mixes the ingredients for you, just check to make sure there is no clumping or unmixed flour in the corners of a horizontal pan during mixing. Use a soft plastic spatula to scrape down the sides of the pan before the baking starts. I usually do this about six minutes into the mixing.

Quick breads can be sweet or savory, plain or loaded with chopped fruit and nuts. There are many foods to choose from to imaginatively flavor a loaf: dried fruits; nuts; fresh fruits such as bananas, citrus, cranberries, pineapple, and papaya; fresh dates; carrots and parsnips; creamy cheeses; olives; and wild rice. The only rule to remember when making bread machine quick breads is to keep the total amount of these extra ingredients small, otherwise they will add too much weight to the batter and you will end up with a flat loaf.

Accent flavors include pungent liqueurs and aromatic extracts, coffee, crushed crystallized ginger, and many sweet exotic spices. Quick loaves successfully integrate all kinds of whole-grain flours, from whole wheat and cornmeal to oatmeal and bran. To make a loaf more sophisticated, while the loaf is still hot I will pierce it and drizzle it with a mixture of equal parts sugar and fruit juice or an alcoholic spirit, to form a thin glaze of flavor. Or I dust a cooled loaf with confectioners’ sugar. A plain, unadorned loaf is just fine, too.

Quick loaves always call for some type of fat to create texture and to contribute to the over-all flavor. This may be oil (I always use a cold-pressed variety when using an olive, seed, or nut oil), a melted solid fat, like butter, margarine, or vegetable shortening (I always use unsalted butter—the flavor is delightfully sweet), or a fat substitute, such as applesauce or prune puree. The bread machine cannot cream sugar and butter, so you must use butter melted or at very soft room temperature. Each fat contributes its own textural qualities to a loaf, depending on what type of fat it is and in what proportion it is used.

For quick breads, I always use unbleached all-purpose flour—rather than the bread flour called for in yeast bread recipes—for the best texture and crumb, as quick loaves need a bit of strength to create these qualities, yet should stay tender. White cake or pastry flour is too delicate in an expanding dough to hold any embellishments in suspension, and a baked loaf made with one of these will be much too tender. Bread flour, on the other hand, is much too strong for quick breads (a batter made with it would look stringy), the high gluten content resists the quick action of the chemical leaveners and bakes up into a tough baked good. When making tender quick breads with whole wheat flour, I often use exclusively whole wheat pastry flour to keep the tender texture and lighten up what would otherwise be a heavy whole-grain batter.

The Quick Bread/Cake cycle on the bread machine mixes and bakes a loaf similar to a 9- by-5-inch oven-baked loaf. Do not confuse this cycle with the Quick Yeast Bread, Rapid, or One Hour cycles designed to make faster yeast breads. On many machines you will have to choose the crust setting, light, medium, or dark, when you use the Quick Bread/Cake cycle. When the mixing is done, you will have a batter, not a dough ball. If the batter does not look sufficiently mixed, press Pause and mix the batter with a few strokes by hand, using a rubber spatula. Press Start and the cycle will resume. The baking may begin immediately, or there may be a rest period after the mixing. Do not open the lid to peek at how the bread is doing until a full thirty minutes into baking to allow the bread to reach its full volume in the heat of the oven. As much as possible, look through the window instead of opening the lid The bread will rise and dry out around the edges first, and then, during the last twenty minutes of baking, will dome slightly in the center.

The Quick Bread/Cake cycle, more than any other, varies widely among different machines, making it a real challenge to develop recipes that work for all machines. The recipes in this chapter were tested on a variety of machines that all had Quick Bread/Cake cycle times of 69, 79, and 89 minutes, depending on whether a light, medium, or dark crust was chosen. This seems to be the most common type of Quick Bread/Cake cycle among newer machines. These recipes should also work well in machines that have longer Quick Bread/ Cake cycles, but begin baking immediately after mixing. If the length of the cycle on your machine is longer, you may have to do some experimenting with baking time to achieve the loaf you want. (See
Bread Machine Baker’s Hint: Baking with the Quick Bread Cycle
for more information.)

A quick loaf is finished baking when the top looks dry inside the small crack that runs down the center, and feels firm when gently touched with your finger; when the edges pull away slightly from the sides of the pan; and when the loaf is evenly browned around the edges. If an indentation remains after you have pressed the top lightly with your finger, it is a sure sign that the loaf needs more baking. Often the top of a bread machine loaf will not be browned as one baked in a conventional oven. The last test for doneness is to insert a cake tester into the center of the loaf; it should come out clean with no crumbs or batter attached.

On some machines, the Quick Bread/Cake cycle has an extra feature that allows you to program additional baking time in one minute intervals, if you need it. On other machines, you may be able to press Stop/Reset and program the Bake Only cycle for more time to finish baking the loaf. Don’t worry if a loaf takes as long as about two hours, or 1
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/
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minutes, to fully bake. Remember that the bread machine bakes at approximately half the temperature of a conventional oven. On some of the older machines, you have to set the bake time manually; if so, set it for 70 minutes and go from there. Also, I never make a quick bread on the Delay cycle; there are too many perishable ingredients.