The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book_ A Guide to Whole-Grain Breadmaking - Laurel Robertson [84]
If you have experimented much baking with fruits you will have observed that sometimes they seem to interfere with the normal rise of yeasted bread. We don’t know of research that pinpoints the exact reasons, but it is not unlikely that fruits contain acids, active enzymes, and reducing sugars, any one of which could affect the quality of your dough. It is hard to generalize, but there are a few tricks that can help insure good results.
If you are baking with a new fruit whose effects on the dough you don’t know, take a few precautions. Later, when you are familiar with its ways, you may decide that this fruit doesn’t hurt the dough and so abandon these techniques with that particular fruit.
The fruit should have about the same moisture content as the dough, or be just a little drier, to prevent its juice from being drawn into the dough. For raisins and currants that are tender but not so soft they fall apart, steam or simmer for a few minutes, drain immediately, and let them cool before using. (When you don’t mind darkening the color of the bread, use the broth as a part of the liquid in the recipe.) Cooking the fruit also deactivates stray enzymes in the fruit that could affect the dough.
Currants need to be washed. Prunes and dates need to be pitted, unless you buy them so; this is easy to forget. We find that there is more variation in the flavor of prunes than in most fruits, by the way, and the good ones are better than you could think. Pitted dates should be checked for inhabitants.
Unsulfured dried fruit is dark brown, tart, and often leathery: it needs to be steamed briefly—but not too soft, please. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, soft apricots can disappear into the dough and make the bread unpleasantly tart. If the fruit you buy is already quite soft, it is worth baking it a half an hour or more in the oven on low heat, so that it can develop the toughness required to stand up and be noticed when the bread’s eating time arrives. Even if the exterior becomes somewhat crusty in the process of drying out in the oven, the flavor improves.
There’s another view on making fruited breads that holds that the best time to add the fruit is after the bread is sliced. Stew apricots, for example, in orange or pineapple juice to make a thick, tangy jam, and spread it on your toast. If the bread is plain, you are then free to use soy spread and tomato or cheddar and pickles on your sandwiches, and not have the challenge of tailoring all the week’s lunches to those succulent bits of apricot in the bread. Still, apricotty bread with peanut butter or almond butter or cream cheese is a real knockout—not to mention that fruit breads make a most welcome gift.
GLOOM ON THE DRIED FRUIT FRONT
It is no secret that bright-colored dried fruits get that way because some form of sulfur has been used to preserve them. Grave questions are being raised about the safety of this ancient technique, and more information seems to be coming every day. Some people are allergic to sulfur, and they shouldn’t have these fruits at all. The rest of us might do well—especially if we eat a lot of dried fruit—to choose the less colorful, unsulfured kind until more research has been done and we know more about the long-term effects of the residues left by this kind of processing.
SOME METHODS OF ADDING FRUIT
Most of these recipes direct you to add dried fruit to the dough just at the end of the kneading period. The advantage is that there is minimal wear and tear on the dough that way, the fruit is evenly distributed, and you don’t have to fuss with it again.
On the other hand, if the raisins are too hot from steaming to add them at the beginning, or you want to add them to only one of the two loaves you are making, there’s no law that says you have to add them in the first stage. For example, you can fold fruit (and nuts) into the dough after the first rise, when you deflate the dough. Press it flat, spread