Savory Gruyere & Scallion Quick Bread

is it wrong to put cheese on cheese bread?

Not to belabor the point, but I like snacks.  Here are some of my favorite snacks:

Cheddar Flavor Blasted Goldfish – At one point my mother was stashing bags of these under her pillow.  One of the primary ingredients is crack cocaine.  Ask anyone.

Salami, Cream Cheese & Dill Pickle Roll-ups – Smear cream cheese on a piece of salami, roll up around a dill pickle. Best snack ever.

Assorted Pickled Things – Pepperocinis, bread and butter pickles, olives, pickled beets, etc.

Pretzels and Spinach Dip – Regular deli kind.

Radishes, Butter and Salt on Bread – Try it, you will love it.  And also feel French.

Enter Gruyere & Scallion Quickbread.  Delicious at breakfast*, as a during-cooking-dinner snack, also as a post-cooking-dinner-watching-X-Files-Season-2-on TV snack.  And you know, with soup and stuff.  Also, extremely easy.  The time it takes between thinking “I should make some Cheesy Scallion Bread” and putting the pan in the oven is about 7 minutes, provided you  have the ingredients.  You could easily omit the scallions if you don’t have any, you could mix nuts into the batter, anything really.

* That reminds me of something I want to rant about.  Why are all breakfast pastries sweet, if they are not bagels?  The huge majority of muffins, breads, rolls and biscuits are sweet, and for god’s sake, sometimes I don’t want 30 lb of sugar first thing in the morning.  Besides which, I just started putting sweetened condensed milk in my coffee in the mornings, so another really sweet thing is overkill.  Have we learned nothing from the popularity of the Bloody Mary?  People like some savory breakfast options.  That is all.

Gruyere & Scallion Quick Bread

1 3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp ground pepper

3 eggs

1/3 cup milk (I used 1%)

1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 tsp dijon mustard

1 cup shredded Gruyere cheese (or cheddar, or parmesan, or any kind)

3 scallions, finely diced

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees and Pam a loaf pan.  In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients and set aside.  In another bowl, whisk together the eggs, milk, oil and mustard.  Fold the wet ingredients into the dry, taking care not to overmix.  Fold in the cheese and scallions, pour into the loaf pan and sort of flatten it into the pan.  Bake for 30-35 minutes, until the top is golden brown.

that's my pretty butter bell next to it. i love it.

- Cat

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

cake for breakfast...always a good idea.

I realized, as I was making this just now, that it is very similar to my great-grandmother Mabel’s recipe for Dutch cake.  That’s Mabel of the burned boobs.  Dutch cake is a great Depression era recipe (no eggs, because eggs were too expensive), my mom used to make it every year for my birthday, and I would bring Dutch cake muffins in to school for my birthday treat.  Full disclosure: all I wanted was yellow cupcakes from a box with chocolate frosting from a jar, but I didn’t want to tell her.  Dutch cake has a far more sophisticated flavor than an 8 year old can appreciate, apparently, because I love it now.  Sorry, mom.  Also full disclosure:  I still REALLY love Funfetti cake, pink, with chocolate frosting from a jar.  I’m the child of both my parents, that is for sure.

This bread is a nice for the morning, but it’s pretty sweet, so calling it bread is kind of a lie.  It’s a coffee cake, really.  It would be fantastic as muffins, and it’s really attractive because of the swirl and the pale colored batter.  But it’s in bread form, so I think you can still put butter on it.  Also it would be DELICIOUS with pecans in or on it, but I didn’t have any, unfortunately.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread adapted from Mangio da Sola

For the swirl:

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tsp cinnamon

For the bread:

1 cup white sugar

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder (Which, halfway through this recipe, I discovered I didn’t have.  The good news is, I had the stuff to make a substitute.  For 1 tsp of baking powder, substitute 1/4 tsp cream of tartar and 1/2 tsp baking soda.)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup milk or buttermilk

1 egg

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla

Method- Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees, and Pam a loaf pan.  Stir together the two sugars and the cinnamon for the swirl part in a small bowl and set aside.  In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, salt and baking soda.  In yet another bowl, whisk the egg, then add the milk, oil and vanilla to the egg.  Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix until JUST combined.  The batter should be lumpy, but you shouldn’t see any flour, really.  If you overmix, the cake will be tough, so just don’t.

Pour half the batter into the loaf pan, spreading it out, or just banging the thing on the counter like I do.  Sprinkle half the sugar/cinnamon mixture on top of the batter, as evenly as you can.  Pour in the rest of the batter on top of the layer of cinnamon/sugar, using a silicone spatula to get it all out, and kind of spread it out if you can.  Then sprinkle the rest of the sugar mixture on top of that.  Using a butter knife, swirl it around the pan, back and forth, gently.  You’re not mixing the batter and sugar, you’re trying to draw lines between them so the layers will still be distinct, but will be evenly distributed.

swirly!

Bake for 40-50 minutes, or until the top is nicely browned.  Look out for the middle sinking- if it’s sunken, it’s probably not done yet, and needs another 5-10 minutes.  You don’t want a nice bread outside and uncooked batter inside.  It’s okay if the outer parts get pretty brown, that’s mostly just the sugar caramelizing, and it will taste delicious.

- Cat

No Knead Bread

Have you tried this yet? There was an article about it in the New York Times a few years ago and it was wildly popular. I saw it on just about every cooking related website I read. The biggest reason is because it is SO EASY. It creates this delicious crusty beautiful bread with practically no work at all. The idea is you make the yeast do all the work.  You make the dough, and then you let it sit for a REALLY long time and then you throw it in a pot and bake it (ok there is a little more to it than that, but not really).

Here we go…

Ingredients:

3 cups flour (bread flour is ideal, but I actually used all purpose, because it was all I had, and it was still great)

½ tsp instant yeast (I used rapid rise, because it was what I had)

1 tsp salt

1 ½ cups luke warm water

Method:

Put the 3 cups of flour in a large bowl, add the salt, the yeast, and the water. Stir until mixed in. It will look something like this.

A big shaggy mess of dough, trust me, it’s supposed to look like that.

Next, cover it with plastic wrap and a kitchen towel and let it sit for 12-20 hours ( I know it’s a long time, but 12 is the minimum, and 20 is about the point at which the yeast will have over worked the dough.  I let mine rest 18).   So if you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s best to make this dough before you go to bed at night, and it will be ready for dinner the next evening.

When you uncover the dough, it will look something like this (I forgot to take a picture of mine, so I found another one online to show you).

Generously flour a clean surface and dump the dough out. Sprinkle a small amount of flour on top and  fold the dough over onto itself, shape it roughly into a ball…something like this.

Cover it again with the plastic wrap and a kitchen towel and let it rest for another 2 hours.

Meanwhile, about 30 minutes before your bread will be done resting, put a pot into the oven and set it to 450 degrees. You can put it in while the oven is cool, but let the pot heat for at least 30 mins.

Let’s talk about this pot for a few minutes. You are going to be putting it in a very hot oven. This means flimsy crappy pots with plastic handles are out. You need something heavy and something that will withstand high heat. Oblong, round, doesn’t matter, but it needs to have at least 4inch high sides. Big heavy pot with a lid, that’s it.

When the pot is preheated carefully pull it out of the oven and remove the lid. The dough should look something like this.

Scoop it, scrape it, roll it, however you want, just get it into the pot.  It won’t be pretty, but I swear it doesn’t matter (that’s how wonderful and easy this bread is!!).

Put the lid on and bake for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake for another 15-30 minutes until the bread is evenly browned and looks something like this.

Now tell me that wasn’t the easiest bread you ever made? AND it was delicious too…right?

One thing to remember is the amount of time this bread takes, while it doesn’t take much work, it takes time to sit, so plan accordingly. You have an initial rise of about 18 hours, then an additional 2 hours of rise time, and 1 hour to bake.

Tomorrow’s post will be about avgolemono soup I made to serve with this delicious bread!

-Sue