I've been making a lot of quick breads lately - partly it is the season, and they freeze and store well. They make good gifts, good afternoon snacks for the kids, good "Oh, crap, we're just about out of bread and I need it ASAP" solutions and other happy things. Quick breads, for those of you who don't bake them, are any kind of bread that doesn't require a long rising time. Most of them use baking soda or yeast. They include sweet breads like cranberry and pumpkin, soda breads, biscuits, muffins, scones, etc...
There are tons of recipes for these, including some great ones here (raspberry almond anyone?). I'm particularly fond of this soda bread when I run out of bread and don't notice until late in the day. These are also great for using up thanksgiving leftovers - we had an abundance of leftover sweet potatoes, so I have just invented sweet potato-walnut bread, and it is yummy. Take any basic quick bread recipe and add fruit or vegetables, herbs or spices pretty much a you want. As long as you keep the proportions of wet and dry ingredients roughly the same, it'll work.
So what's your favorite quick bread recipe?
Sharon
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I'm a fan of cornbread. This recipe is my favorite: http://homesicktexan.blogspot.com/2007/01/iron-pan-perfect-cornbread.ht…
I'm intolerant to wheat, so I replace the 1/2 cup flour with either rice flour or with fine-ground cornmeal. I've also added really sharp cheddar or raclette cheese to this recipe with great success, as well as jalapeno and jack cheese for a slightly sharper taste. So, so good.
Pumpkin bread is my absolute favorite. I use freshly roasted pumpkin (which doesn't make it so quick!) and I just mash it with a potato masher so it ends up having chunks of pumpkin in it...not everyone's favorite but definitely mine! Oh, and no cloves :-)
I love quick breads, since most make two loaves. Eat one now, put one in the freezer for when I don't have time to bake but need snacks. I usually make mine slightly sweet, but have put pretty much every fruit (including pumpkin and squash) in. All are delightful, and mostly healthy with the mix of wheat flour, wheat germ and ground flaxseed I mix in. Yummy!
I've experimented going gluten-free, to see if it helped my allergies and asthma. No change to those problems, but it has relieved neuropathic foot pain. Go figure. So far I've come up with two cornbread recipes (one sweet, one not-sweet) and a banana bread recipe. The banana bread recipe is absolutely decadent if I use some almond flour in the flour mix, which is normally sorghum and brown rice flours.
I love this recipe because you can toss whatever you have into it! I have used pumpkin puree, sweet potato and bananas in it so far.
http://tastykitchen.com/recipes/breads/a-to-z-bread/
The rustic potato bread recipe in _Baking with Julia_. It's a yeasted bread, so not a quick as a chemically leavened bread, but pretty fast. You can decide to bake it and have two large loaves out of the oven in roughly 4 hours, which seems very speedy to me. And of course, much of that time is hands-off waiting. I like potato breads for their uncanny way of staying fresh for much longer than other breads.
For the chemically leavened bread category, I'd have to say zucchini bread, especially when following 101 Cookbooks' super-duper accessorized zucchini bread recipe.
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/my-special-zucchini-bread-recipe-r…
The soda bewad recipe won't show unless you join the site, Sharon. Can you circumvent this and give us the recipe?
Oh the irony of it.
A Luddite with a freezer.
How exactly would the freezer keep frozen if we had the nothing but windmills you parasites want to impose on us, and there was no wind?
batteries, neil. batteries.
and it's not that we WANT nothing but windmills it's that we recognize that we are taking more than our share of the dwindling petroleum and are trying to balance that out--conservation, renewables, choosing the more important uses for that energy which is ours to use. it isn't WHAT appliances you use, it's HOW MUCH power you use.
Batteries. What using up chemicals and stuff. Tut tut.
Yeah, that america's test kitchen thing you linked to won't give us the recipe, Sharon. Would be better to j
ust post the recipe next time. They can't copyright a recipe remember.
Omg, they want my credit card number before they will give up the recipe! I thought it was just a nag screen. Sharon, maybe you could edit the post to add the recipe, though it is too late for me, I wanted to fucking actually use it for dinner tonight.