Buttermilk Banana Bread

When Bruce made butter the other day (you can find it here), I said he was left with some milky liquid in the bowl after the fat had globbed together into yellow bliss. That liquid, of course, was buttermilk. No, not the cultured stuff from the grocery store. Instead, this was old-fashioned buttermilk, the liquid remnants of butter making, only slightly sour and very flavorful. You can see it in that jar to the side of the other ingredients on the counter.

As you may know, we created this blog to preach our passion: real food, nothing fake, no hyped-but-faux ingredients. We've slowly been building a storehouse of recipes that don't use any processed fare.

This buttermilk certainly fits the bill. It's part of a new baking strategy around our house: only raw sugar like turbinado or muscavado, better flavor and better heft in batters; flavorful fats like avocado oil and walnut oil that beat those processed, tasteless oils hands down; and dedicated, delicious treats, made without anything fake in the mix.

Could you use regular, cultured buttermilk, the kind most often found at the store? Of course! Is it real food? Yes with a caveat. It is a bit of a fake-out, but not a chemical one; so we're OK listing it among the real food ingredients on this blog. But that said, use the low-fat version. It'll have more of the texture and taste of the homemade, old-fashioned stuff. Let's get cooking!

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Panzanella

Can you believe it's almost Labor Day? The summer has flown by. Where we live, some trees at the back of our property near the brook are already tipping red on the upper branches. The light is more precious--and clearer, too, as if in compensation as the sun sets behind the valley a little earlier than it was doing about a month ago.

Bruce and I celebrated the last bits of summer yesterday with a hearty plate of panzanella, an Italian bread salad made with lots of veggies, particularly sun-ripe tomatoes. Without any ado, because it's the best gift for the end of the season, here it is, ready for your holiday weekend:

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Banana Bread

Years ago, Bruce found the answer to the best banana bread (as if such a thing were a pressing question). We put it, along with other answers to pressing questions in The Ultimate Cook Book.

The secret? Walnut oil--which gives this easy quick-bread such a deep, nutty, satisfying taste.

There's a certain trend among food writers lately to kick canola oil and its cohorts, the other "tasteless" oils. I will tell you that since oil is oil in terms of calories (about 120 per tablespoon), there's no point in adding an oil that doesn't also add flavor. But that said, mild oils are a great way to start out chili and other hot dishes--because these oils don't interfere with the more complex, layered flavors.

However, in banana bread, walnut oil is definitely the way to go.

So let's go.

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Baguettes, Part Two

On we go from last time. (For that, click here.)

The dough has been set aside in that clichéd "warm, draft-free place." And it's doubled in bulk over about an hour. In other words, there's about twice of it, compared to when it started, thanks to the yeast eating too much. About like me.

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Baguettes, Part One

When Bruce and I met, I was the baker in the family. It stemmed from an awful failure in graduate school: orange breakfast rolls. I was taking an advanced seminar in medieval chivalric romance, it met at 8:00 am, and we grad students agreed to take turns bringing in breakfast to help us get through three hours of Petrarchan references. Also? The professor was a strict, emaciated, no-nonsense type who'd spent her entire adult life crawling around convents in Europe to find a source for one half of Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale. In other words, she wasn't exactly a laugh a minute.

On the week I was up for breakfast, I decided to make this orange breakfast roll recipe I'd found in some cooking magazine--sort of like cinnamon rolls but with candied orange peel and a pinch of ground cardamom sprinkled on the dough before it was rolled up.

I was up until four in the morning trying to get the stuff to rise.

Out of that misfortune came a determination to make yeast work. (Maybe I'd taken in some of that grim single-mindedness from my convent-crawling professor.)

Over the ensuing years, I baked a lot of bread. Before I met Bruce and even after. Because he was at first the typical chef-school type: I cook; I don't bake. (Make sure you say it with a slight sneer.) Except he watched me a few times--and got totally into it. His downfall from the heights of proper cheffery? Making a decent pie crust. But that's another story entirely.

Today he's quite the baker. He whips up fresh bread for dinner--just because.

So on to these simple, homey baguettes we had with soup the other night. I realize I've delayed too long with this story. But consider it proper training for bread-making: lots of patience.

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