The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [125]
FLOURS
Because they do not depend entirely on gluten for rising, quick breads and muffins can make good use of flours other than wheat, especially if the recipe includes some wheat flour or an egg or two. They’ll make a bread heavier than you’d get with wheat, though rolled oats—not really a flour, of course—can make astonishingly light, very pretty breads and muffins. For one cup wheat flour, you can substitute about:
1 cup rye flour or cornmeal
¾ cup buckwheat, rice, or barley flour
1 ¼ cup bean flour
1 ¼ cup rolled oats
Keep the flavor and the mood of your proposed substitute in mind when you plan your bread. None of these characters is a straight-across double for wheat; each has its own personality. Most perform better supported by wheat flour.
On the other hand, to use bread flour as the only flour, especially in plain loaves or muffins, makes for a flat flavor, and if the vigor of your mixing develops the gluten, the bread will be chewy where it should be tender. Most of the recipes for quick loaves call for a combination of bread and pastry flours, but if all-purpose whole wheat flour is available in your area, and convenient in your kitchen, you could use it instead of the combined bread- and pastry-flour measures. Muffins, and even loaves without the extra burden of fruits and nuts, are perhaps best with whole wheat pastry flour only.
WHEAT GERM
Wheat germ can add a lot to quick breads, both in flavor and texture, and many of our recipes call for it. We prefer toasted to raw. Wheat germ goes rancid very fast, so don’t buy it in large quantities and do store it in the refrigerator.
Liquids, Fats, Sweeteners, Tidbits
WATER; any form of milk; potato cooking broth; fruit juice; crushed, stewed, blended, grated raw fruits; zucchini (as if I had to tell you)—any of these can provide acceptable “wet” ingredients for a quick bread. As a rule of thumb, use about ½ to ⅔ cup liquid for each cup of flour. Of course this will vary with both the nature of the liquid and the type of flour. If you are adding cooked beans or grains, reduce the liquid measure by about ⅔ cup for each cup of beans or cereal you add. We have tried to include recipes that exemplify many of these options so that you can use them as guidelines in devising your own.
FAT in quick breads may be oil or butter or a combination. You can use sesame butter, peanut or other nut or seed butters. If the recipe is plain, choosing dairy butter over oil may make a difference, but if the other ingredients provide interesting flavor, the bread may be just as tasty if you use plain oil. If you do opt for butter, cream it with the sweetener until the mixture is fluffy. The addition of fat in some form contributes tenderness, a soft, moist crumb, and fullness of flavor; we have not found any way to make good quick breads with none at all.
SWEETENERS tenderize the crumb, too, and help the bread cook properly, though if you use enough sweet fruit—bananas, for example, or dates—you actually can make a passable sweet-flavored loaf or muffin without adding the likes of honey or molasses. More practical, though, it seems to us, is to use a little bit of sweetener and have a better-textured as well as a tastier bread.
TIDBITS—chopped dried fruits, nuts, seeds, sprouted grains—can be folded in when you’re combining the wet and dry ingredients. If it’s protein you’re after, you can incorporate as much as a cup of grated tofu or ½ cup cooked soy grits in a quick loaf. Choose a recipe that has plenty of flavor, like Mince Spice Loaf or Applesauce Bread on 323. The soy will make the bread’s flavor blander.
Nearly everyone has tried the standard zucchini loaves by now, and if you have gotten this far with us, you already know how we feel about them, too. But our own experiments with using zucchini in quick breads have been pretty rewarding, and a few have been good enough to include in this