To understand this recipe, you have to know one thing about me: I eat cheddar cheese on top of my banana bread. Yes, I know I’m weird. Chris has told me so several times. My mom has conveniently forgotten that this is the way we ate it the entire time I was growing up. I know this because one of the times that Chris told me I was weird, I tried to get her to back me up about it being the way we always did it, and she denied it. That was how we ate our Swedish raisin rye bread, but our banana bread? No cheese ever touched it, if you ask her now.

Whatever. I know the truth. And even if the meeting of toasted banana bread and melted cheddar is a figment of my imagination, I’m glad to have it in my cheese-addled mind.

Yesterday, there were two overripe bananas staring at me from their place in the fruit bowl, and I was hungry, so I decided to make banana bread. I opened to the page in my breakfast recipes binder that lists both my mom’s recipe and my healthy variation on it (think applesauce replacing oil, whole wheat flour, added oat bran, etc.). I knew I wanted to make both of them at some point in the near future to test the recipes and take some photos, but I was ambivalent as to which one I wanted to do right then.

One of the directions I wrote in both recipes mentions the cheddar cheese thing (the direct quote is “best toasted with melted butter and cheese. mmmmm.”), and I started thinking about my eccentric preference, and how if it was wrong, I didn’t want to be anywhere near right. And then inspiration struck. If I put the cheese in the banana bread, everyone who ate the bread would have to try it with the cheese! And I could save myself work when it came to eating it myself. All I’d have to do is toast the bread and slather a bit of Irish butter on it. Of course, I could even put butter in the bread!

Here is the recipe for my fiendish master plan. Though, I would like to note that I don’t think the cheese thing is really all that weird. We pair many fruits and cheese together, and the sharpness of the cheddar really does set off the sweetness of the banana bread. The very best part of every slice, though, is the crunchy top crust formed by the sugar and cinnamon I sprinkle on right before sending the loaf into the oven. I still have the childish temptation to eat only the top half of every slice.

And as less-healthy as I’m saying this is, I did use whole wheat flour rather than white. I let myself eat a lot more dairy fat than white flour, so this really isn’t so far out of my usual eating philosophy.

Cheddar Banana Bread

(printable version)
A richer variation of my mother’s non-cheddarific recipe.
Yield: 1 loaf

Ingredients
Wet
3 bananas, mashed
2 oz. (4 tablespoons) butter, melted
2 eggs, well beaten

Dry
1 3/4 cups flour (I used King Arthur Flour’s White Whole Wheat, but all purpose would work as well.)
3/4 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
2/3 cup sugar

1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
Cinnamon and sugar for dusting the top

Procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray loaf pan with oil.
2. In a medium mixing bowl, combine the wet ingredients. Add the dry ingredients and stir to combine again. Add the cheddar cheese and stir one more time.
3. Scrape the batter into a loaf pan. Smother with a good dusting of sugar and cinnamon, and put the pan in the oven.
4. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 15 minutes, then remove from the pan and allow to cool until sturdy enough to cut or cool enough to wrap up and store.

Notes

• Next time I make this, I plan to try adding a cup and a half of cheese in search of the perfect cheese-to-banana balance.
• I only had two bananas this time, so I added a third of a cup of applesauce so that the batter was loose enough to stir.

Needless to say, the bread came out wonderfully. It was almost like a scone (once I slathered it with a generous helping of Irish butter), with a wonderful nutty flavor. It was certainly one of the better 100% whole wheat breads I’ve eaten in awhile, and I expect to be acquiring more of this great flour soon so I can make more.

Note to King Arthur Flour (since I know at least someone from your company reads this blog): The instructions said to “cut a deep cross in the top of the loaf” (before baking). To me, that meant that I made a nice round ball and cut a cross about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through it, expecting that it would expand and close up like a yeasted loaf might. However, the end result was a loaf with four separate pyramid-like peaks. Granted, I think that it looked really cool, but it made for poorly shaped slices.

Because I’m cooking from a book, I don’t think I can reproduce the recipe in this blog without a copyright violation, so you’ll have to bear with me until I can come up with a few of my own recipes before you’ll see many ingredient lists. With that said, I love this cook book, and think it’s a necessity for any home baker’s bookshelf.

The Barm (also known as a starter)

One of the best starters that Tiger remembers from pastry school is started with organic grapes (which are covered in wild yeast). When we couldn’t find the particular recipe, we turned to the internet and found a good set of instructions. I got myself a pound of grapes from Whole Foods (they have to be organic and unwashed/treated — the non-organic ones don’t have enough wild yeast still living on them).

The recipe is fairly easy, so I’ll let you read the details on your own. Basically, you squish up the grapes (throw out any bad grapes and brush off any dirt, but don’t wash them) and let them sit for a few days. Once they start to bubble, you strain out the skins and start feeding it with bread flour. Once you have a good seed culture, you can alter the flavor by your feeding schedule. I find that feeding the sour by weight is more reliable than by volume, but the most important part is to make sure that the ratio of flour and water are the same. The Bread Baker’s Apprentice suggests that you can double, triple, or quadruple the barm — the higher the ratio of flour and water to starter, the less sour your final bread will taste. I like to use this for sourdough, so I usually feed at 1::1 (usually 8 oz of starter, to 8 oz each of water and flour) unless I plan to store it for awhile in the refrigerator (in which case I’ll often do a triple volume feeding).

You should also know that storing your barm in the fridge will help produce a stronger sour taste. This is because the bacteria that produce the sour flavor generally work slower than the yeasts in the barm, but the cooler temperatures will slow down the yeast and let the bacteria catch up.

Firm Starter
With many artisan breads, you make an overnight starter (there are actually three main variants of this, based primarily on the amount of liquid: biga, poolish, pâte fermentée). With non-sourdough breads, you would usually just mix up flour, water, yeast, and occasionally salt. With this bread, you make the overnight starter with the barm instead of yeast. Once you mix the barm with flour and water, you let it sit on the counter for around 4 hours, and then toss it into the fridge overnight to improve its flavor. This part is important because it allows the sour flavor to develop.

Dough

On day 2, take your firm starter out of the fridge and cut it up into a bunch of small pieces to warm up for an hour. I put mine on a silpat and covered them with plastic wrap to keep them from drying out. Next, you mix the firm starter in with your other ingredients. Though the recipe calls for about 20 oz of additional white bread flour, it also says that the other flours can be substuted. Following the advice in the baguette recipe from the same book, I decided to substitute about 1/4 of the bread flour with sifted wheat flour. I like King Arthur Flour’s white whole wheat flour, so I sifted it to remove some of the larger pieces of what bran (which can cut gluten and make proper rising/shaping more difficult). The (now mostly) whole wheat flour will add a bit more complexity to the overall sourdough loaf, and make it slightly healthier.

Understanding gluten development is one of the most important parts mixing good bread dough. If the gluten does not develop properly, you won’t be able to shape the dough, and when it proofs, it will stretch outward instead of upward, resulting in a very dense loaf. The trick is what’s called the “window pane method”, which is demonstrated in the two images to the right. The first image shows dough that is not yet ready — notice that it breaks easily. The second shows dough that stretches thinly and allows light to pass through fairly easily. A few breaks are OK, especially when using even a little whole wheat flour, but the dough should be able to stretch fairly thin.

I’ve found that a good test for the time left for gluten development is to take a small piece of dough (usually the same one I use for the windowpane test) and roll it around between my hands to knead it very quickly. This way, you can stretch it again and see if more kneading will improve the gluten development, or if you have reached a point where more kneading will actually start to break the gluten strands because they have been stretched too tightly.

Once your dough is ready, it goes into a big bowl, tossed with a little oil (I just use a good organic spray oil), coated in plastic wrap, and left to ferment (i.e. rise) for several hours. The wild yeasts in a homemade sourdough rise a lot slower than commercially available bread yeast, so this phase takes 3-4 hours instead of the 1-2 that is more common for other bread types. You can do this at room temperature, but I happen to have a “bread proofing” mode on my oven and I prefer to use that.

Shaping

After the dough has risen and approximately doubled in size, carefully divide it into two pieces (being careful not to punch it down any more than necessary) and shape them into whatever shape you prefer for your loaves. In my case, I used a couche (well, actually a fine-weave kitchen towel because it costs less and works just as well) and shape into a somewhat elongated loaf. Once again, these get spritzed with a little oil, covered in plastic wrap and are set aside in the proofer (to actually proof this time) for several more hours.

I’ve determined that it takes about 30 minutes for my oven to heat, so about half an hour before my proofing time is up, I turn my oven up to 500° F and make sure that my baking stone and a large hotel pan are in place. The hotel pan (or other large metal pan) is another trick from this book to help emulate a professional baking oven by providing steam — more on this later.

Once the oven was hot, I started boiling water for the steam pan, and removed my bread from the proofing drawer to slash. Carefully roll the proofed loaves off of the couche and onto a baking peel that has been prepared with cornmeal.

Slashing the bread not only provides an attractive look, but also breaks the tight skin around the loaf that you get from properly shaping. This exposes the moist insides of the loaves and encourages them to rise upward in the oven, instead of spreading out.

Baking
Once the oven is hot, your loaves have been slashed, and the water is boiling, you’re ready to bake. Slide the loaves off of the peel onto the baking stone, toss one cup of boiling water into the steam pan, and close the oven door. The steam will provide a humid environment that lets the bread rise more before the crust sets, as well as contribute to a much crispier crust once the steam has dissipated.

The book suggests that I should open the oven door several more times at 30 second intervals, spraying the sides of the oven with water each time. However, I’ve discovered that it’s very easy to shatter the light bulbs in an oven with a little misplaced water. Instead, I’ve noticed that the water in the steam pan doesn’t boil off quickly enough and I am left with a humid oven that doesn’t let the crust harden enough, so instead of spritzing, I just shake the steam pan around a bit to make its water boil again. I’ve found that it’s more helpful to use a large thin-sided hotel pan instead of the cast iron frying pan I was originally using, both because of its larger surface area, and because it heats up much faster. About 90 seconds after putting the bread into the oven, reduce the temperature to 450° and bake for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, remove the steam pan if it still has any water in it, and rotate your loaves 180° for even color. Bake for another 10-12 minutes until the loaves are done, and remove them to a wire rack to cool for at least 45 minutes. This is the most difficult time for me — the house now smells like wonderful fresh bread, but I know that it’s still technically cooking inside and won’t be nearly as good. It’s worth the wait, so let it sit.

Between the grape-based starter and the recipe, this is the first sourdough I’ve made that actually tastes sour. I’ll definitely be making it again (or some variant of my own so I can share the recipe).

Someone should tell all of that to the seven inches that’s set up camp in my yard, and the ice packed onto every roadway. It’s overstayed its welcome.

Oh, it was a fun guest on Thursday when it all fell in a matter of hours. The whole day took on the feel of a real snow day, complete with powdery snowman snow, another rarity in our region. Our snowballs usually crumble or pack down to nothing but lethal ice. Baker Bee was off work and baking Portuguese sweet bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (which makes the best toast and French toast I’ve ever had, especially when topped with my dad’s apple butter–we went through a whole jar on two loaves), and a couple of snowed-in friends stopped off in the middle of a walk for rest and a warm drink. I continued reaquainting myself with tools and supplies from pastry school and cake decorating. Opening the tubs that had been gathering dust in the spare bedroom for far too long now was enough like tearing into Christmas presents to infuse the day with a festive spirit. It was the first snow day I’ve had as an adult that really felt like a snow day.

Yesterday, however, without fresh flakes to revive it, the snow started to take on the appearance of a houseguest who’d lost all of their luggage down to their tolietry kit but insisted they could “get by” until the airline came through and delivered their stuff. It looked cold and tired, and the prospect of the winter storm that’s supposed to hit on Sunday made it not seem like quite the miracle it had been the day before. The fun was gone for the most part, but Baker Bee did bake another loaf of bread–a Italian-ish white loaf with some of the new sour we’re cultivating in the fridge. It didn’t turn out very sour–I didn’t really expect it to have much sour to it yet–but it did have a lot of flavor, so Mr. Bee suggested we should make pasta to go with it.

I decided I didn’t want anything heavy, like the cheese sauce Baker Bee wanted to make. Olive oil and roasted veggies seemed like the best way to go. I thought about the vegetables we had in the fridge–vegetables that needed attention as soon as possible, since the vegetable barely stew he’d made on Monday had been too good to think of cooking anything else before it was all gone. Crimini mushrooms, mixed bell peppers, broccoli florets, Campari tomatoes. Not my usual combination for pasta, but okay. And then I got out a big casserole dish and started slicing vegetables.

In the pan, I tossed the mushrooms, orange and red bell peppers, and broccoli with olive oil, coarsely-chopped garlic, salt, black pepper, and a mixture of dried oregano, basil, thyme and marjoram, then put it in to roast at 375° for about 45 or 50 minutes total. I stirred the veggies every five to seven minutes, a bit more often than I probably should have but I kept smelling something charring in the oven, like a barbeque, which might have been the mushrooms sticking out on top or (more likely) some of the cornmeal that has escaped off of Baker Bee’s pizza stone during the bread-baking spree.

When I opened the door each time, though, a wonderful aroma bathed my face along with the steam, carrying with it the smell of the roasted vegetables reminded me most of the ones I get on my sandwiches at a place called Grinders up north when I go to watch True Blood with a writing friend. (If you live in the area and end up north of Shoreline on Aurora sometime, make sure to stop there for lunch. So, so messy and so, so good. Plus the amibiance inside is a lot cooler than you might guess from the location and the outside of the building.)

The tomatoes went in separately, quartered and lying on their backs, with more olive oil and a good dusting of (vegetarian) bacon salt and regular sea salt. I think they shared the oven with the other vegetables for about the last 15 minutes. When they started looking happy and roasted, I shut off the oven, opened the door a bit and left all the vegetables in there to keep warm while Baker Bee made the whole wheat spaghetti and tossed it with a jar of organic heirloom pasta sauce we got to try. (It was very good, by the way…tasty but thin enough not to compete with the veggies.) Once all was ready, we layered the veggies over the pasta and sprinkled it all with parmesan cheese.

I was expecting a lot less from this pasta than it delivered, possibly because I don’t normally roast the vegetables that I put in with pasta–it’s far too easy to boil some broccoli in the same water as the pasta and call it slightly healthy. But the texture of the vegetables and the pasta were just right. The “tooth-feel” of the mushrooms in particular was exactly what I was looking for, which was a roasted equivalent of the perfectly cooked mushrooms in Baker Bee’s vegetable barely stuff earlier in the week. The flavors were the sort that get better as you eat. I thought I was getting full and set my plate aside, but soon I was craving the pasta again and took it back in hand. All in all, a warm, flavorful dish that took me immediately back to my cozy snow day feeling from the day before.