Cooking: Sweet Bread and Oat Bars

Just a short post about baking something I've wanted to try for a long time.




Easter is this weekend, and while I'm not particularly religious anymore, I still have strong memories of this time of year, particularly associated with the sweet bread my grandmother used to make.

My dad's mother was Italian, first generation immigrant to America (her parents came over on the boat, I mean.) She is the only grandparent I remember, the others died when I was very young. And she loved to bake (or at least, she did a lot of baking). I remember one year we flew back to Cleveland to visit and she had made a dozen pizzas from scratch. I need to get the recipe for her pizza dough and pizza sauce someday. I think my aunt's might have it?

Anyway, every year at Easter we would get a package from Grandma with candy and cards and sweet bread, usually at least 4 loaves. We ate it as toast for breakfast for weeks after, and as snacks. It's a memory of home for me. A comfort. The smell of it in particular, a sweet smell of bread with a slight hint of anise (the key ingredient I think). Aproustian is not such a fan of the anise, so these days I'm the only one who eats sweet bread in our house when mom sends us a loaf.

In the decade after Grandma died, my aunts and mom have taken over the role of sweet bread bakers. They've practiced and interpreted the recipe almost every year, figuring out what works. Of course it takes interpretation because as a hand written recipe it would say things like "add a cup of sugar and a little more" and such. To be fair they're lucky my Grandma gave them a recipe at all...

I've always wanted to be closer to my heritage. I know I'm lucky to know what my heritage is, and it makes me want to appreciate it more. I wish I had spent more time talking to Grandma about that sort of thing when she was alive sometimes, but first I was a child with barely any concept of such things, then I was an insular and occasionally rely teenager, and then I was in college, and then she was gone. It's definitely one of the "if I was the person then that I am now, I would have done things differently" sort of regrets. But as the person I was then is responsible for the person I am now, I can't be too upset with my past self. I can only try to recover some of what I want.

So this year that was to finally try to make Grandma's sweet bread. It's the first year I've had time and motivation to do such an undertaking. It's the first time I've tried cooking with yeast.

So first I gathered the ingredients as best I could. I couldn't find cake yeast in the grocery stores, so I looked up a conversion calculator (at my mom's suggestion) to dry yeast, and figured I'd have to make do. The day before I tried the baking I talked to mom on the phone to get the whole recipe, since the one I have saved on my computer only told me the ingredients apparently.

The baking process is a long one for bread like this, as it has to rise several times, and the house has to be warm enough not to kill the yeast while I work with it, so the day of I turned the house up to 78 degrees and started the heat. Normally I'm a cold weather person, but this is worth a little heat suffering I feel.

I set out the ingredients.

The workspace in the kitchen.

I melted and cooled the crisco I needed, and set the yeast in a bowl of lukewarm water with a little bit of sugar to get it activated. I proceeded to sing "Just a spoonful of sugar helps the yeast to activate" for the rest of the morning. 

I put 2/3 of the 9 cups of flower into the mixing bowl, and made a little well in the middle, into which I would pour the rest of the ingredients. I beat 6 eggs lightly, then mixed in the sugar to the eggs, which was an interesting texture to work with. Then I poured everything into the well of flour, and started mixing with the bread hook. Once the hook made it into a sticky dough, I started adding the remaining three cups of flour and working it in with my hand, trying to get it to the point of being not sticky.

It looks like dough!

This is when it has to rise a few times. I cover the bowl with a damp (and warm!) kitchen towel, and cover that with a second dry towel. Since I'm heating the house I could leave it out to rise, but mom recommended I preheat the oven to a low temperature, then turn the oven off, and use that to rise the dough when I can to avoid drafts. Apparently yeast is sensitive to drafts. I forbid anyone else from coming in the front door until I'm done (Aproustian is the only one home at this point and she's working, so that's easy).

And then I do something else for an hour while it rises, I hope.

It rose! I should have taken a picture before this, but I was too excited...

After the first hour, I check the dough. It did rise! The towels are pushed up off the bowl a bit, and the dough is sticky where it touches the towel. I add some flour to make it less sticky (I'm trying not to add too much, apparently that makes it a heavier bread) and then punch it back down. I replace the towels with a new warm damp one and the dry one, and let it rise again for another hour. It does rise again this hour, though not as drastically as the first time. Dough that rises is almost a magical thing, it makes me very excited.

The dough is ready to rise again

It needs one more rise, but this time I need to preheat the oven so I can bake the bread when it's done. 

So I separate the dough into three pans by rolling it out on a cutting board and cutting it approximately into thirds 

Still looks like dough!

(we only have one loaf pan, but I remember Grandma used to make them round as well as rectangular, although I'm not going to hide a hard boiled egg in my bread like she used to) and cover each pan with a damp towel, then with a dry towel.

So close to being bread!

Because the dough is rising for a third hour outside the oven, I decide to throw together another quick thing that I associate with my heritage. I'm not purely Italian, I know I also have a lot of German ancestry, as well as some Scottish (and possible English or Irish, last I heard we weren't sure). My Scottish heritage is another thing I have embraced in the past. I did Scottish Country Dancing for several years, and wore a kilt to my wedding (as well as when dancing a lot). I also found a Scottish Oat Bar recipe online (whether it's really Scottish or not... well it's the internet. But they are delicious!) which I have made so much I almost have the recipe memorized. It's one of my favorite things to put together for breakfasts when guests come by or when a holiday approaches. And it bakes at the same temperature as the bread!

Five cups of oats, a cup of flour, a cup of brown sugar, and some salt and baking soda go into the cleaned out mixing bowl. Then a cup of butter, warmed slightly in the microwave.

Ready to go!

And then I mix until the consistency is right. Basically it starts looking like granola? It's hard to describe... fortunately I took a picture.

That's the texture I like to see!

I then pour a cup of cool water over the mixture, and work it with my hands until it forms a ball. Transfer to a greased 9x5 baking pan, and cook for 20-25 minutes. And I did all that during the third rise of the sweet bread!

That being accomplished, it's time to bake my bread! Into the oven for 30-45 minutes. 

Ready to bake!

Mom says the bread is done when you tap it and it sounds hollow, which made perfect sense when I heard it for reasons I cannot explain. I checked at 40 minutes, and it sounded hollow!

It looks like bread! It smells like bread!

After it cooled, I tried the bread. The anise flavor is not as strong as I'm used to (I only used one ounce bottle of the extract. I later heard from my aunts that they use two these days because they think the extract itself has gotten weaker) but that's probably good. Aproustian says she actually likes it this way. Bigg Nife thinks it tastes good, though I haven't found a food he dislikes yet (and today he took about half the pan of oat bars for lunch...) and Hatstand says it's ok, though she's not a huge fan of anise as a spice. 

So it's a success! It smells like Easter to me, and I'm not the only one who likes it. The bread rose like I hoped, and it tastes great to me. 

I'm so happy I gave this a try! Maybe I'll be able to find the cake yeast for next year, and figure out how that works...