Beautiful Breads from Bountiful Harvests

There are more ways than you think to use the garden’s produce.

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Harvest breads are a delicious , sanitary , and rude contact between the garden and the board . They can sum up color to your meals , seasonal harmony to a carte du jour , and — much like a seeded player catalog make it in the profundity of winter — remind us of sunnier daytime and warm , sweet summertime air . What more could you ask — except , perhaps , for a personal gardener ?

In the day before all this personal business became stylish — personal trainers , personal coaches , personal gurus , and the same — I was lucky enough to have a personal nurseryman . In truth , he was n’t all mine . At the time , I was the chief Captain James Cook and bottle washer for an juvenile chemical group dwelling here in the White Mountains of New Hampshire . And Michael was the faculty property coach and gardener , a nurseryman so talented I swear he could grow eggplant in Antarctica if he prove . Day after daytime , Michael would leave an overwhelming harvest in my kitchen — pail of squashes , great bales of bread , towering peck of green bean , spud , and maize . And day after day , I had to dream up cunning unexampled agency to practice it all .

bake is my first erotic love in the kitchen , so it was quite natural that much of what Michael deposit on my work table detect its style into my breads , both quick and yeasted . I ’m experimental to begin with , so dreaming up harvesting breads became almost 2d nature . Cornbread on the menu tonight ? Why do n’t we supersede some liquidness with puréed mash ? How would that pizza ( or focaccia ) scratch broil up if we put in those leftover mashed potatoes ? Would the muffins taste like carrot cake if we append grated carrots to them ? ( The nipper would wish that ! ) A harvesting bread baker instruct to think like this . He always has one eye trained on the garden , the other peeled for fresh fresh baking formula to play up the seasonal abundance .

The introductory requirement for create harvest time breadstuff , then , are fondness for baking , access to fresh produce , and an questioning culinary nature . Beyond that , your everyday kitchen equipment will do : bread and Proto-Indo European pans , baking sheets , loaf of bread genus Pan , and an oven . And , of course , a platoon of willing feeder . But that ’s the easy part . These harvest breads are so good , so attractive , and so good for you , that your main problem will be stay fresh up with the demand .

Which vegetables make the best breads?If harvest time breads are my passion , I ’ve yet to sit down and codify the music genre in any meaningful mode . Still , there are some canonical , die hard themes that keep resurface over the years . The first include those cabbage made with cooked vegetable , either mash or puréed , and incorporated instantly into the batter or dough . The most common vegetable used in this fashion are sweet potatoes , wintertime squashes , and all - function potatoes . In the first two cases , you get the benefit of color ; in all three , subtle flavor and a conditioning effect on the sugar .

By stipulate effect I mean that these veg tend to damp the slugger or boodle , much the way it would if you used yogurt or sour pick for part of the liquid . You ’ll notice this justly away when you make the two yeast wampum ( the focaccia and the sweet white potato vine scratch ) . The boodle are somewhat softer , and stickier , than you ’re probably used to . But that ’s no crusade for concern . When you knead them , just use plenty of flour on your kneading surface and work gently at first to avoid tearing the dough . You ’ll also acknowledge it with the cornbread , but in a different path : The conditioning burden weakens the construction of the scratch , making it more compact . thick but delicious .

Sautéed veggie , most notably onions , garlic , and mushroom , have lead to some very successful crop lucre experimentation . I ’ve made a sort of savory unenviable roll or pinwheel wind collector roll using a turgid quantity of chopped , sautéed onions for the filling . The dough is rolled out , covered with the onion , then rolled up like a rug . This log is then cut into heavyset slices and post , flat side down , in a buttered pan . Alternatively , a loaf ’s worth of dough can be rolled into a 14 - in . circle , covered with Allium cepa , then cut like a pizza pie into eight wedge . Starting at the wide end , roll up the wedges , pulling down the ends into a crescent shape . Let boost and bake . They make an splendid addition to your Thanksgiving bread basket .

This would be a ripe place to mention herbs , which I ’d be more than probable to let in in an onion plant bread such as the one I just described . A few leaves of chop salvia or rosemary , which I ’ve include in thePotato and Onion Focaccia , do much to underscore the harvest melodic theme . Sometimes pernicious is best . Just a whispering of a single herbaceous plant impart to a yeast loot can make your point better than a handful .

Perhaps you ’ve never consider of your preferent courgette loaf of bread as a harvest home bread , but I do , and I admit it under the grated- veggie category . Zucchini adds moisture , but other than that , it is relatively transparent . Does anyone , I ’ve always wondered , even smack the poppycock ? Grated carrots , on the other hand , supply bouquet and a bit more texture than courgette does . Here , I combine them with another seasonal standout , cranberries , for acolorful harvest gem . answer them at a special holiday breakfast . You wo n’t be good-for-nothing .

harvesting breads can make , or simply gracility , the menuThis is the start of soup and stew season , both of which would ascertain the stark partnership withGolden Squash Cornbread . For a crisp , brown crust , bake it directly in a cast - atomic number 26 skillet . ThePotato and Onion Focacciapairs off beautifully with soup as well , not to mention virtually any saucy , tomato - based dish . But one of the grounds I bake it in the pie pans to start with is that the side hold in the dough and tug it up . This tally height , along with the sissiness of the bread , makes it nearly unsurpassable for sandwiches . ( turn out the loot into six or eight wedges , then slice the wedges in one-half . ) Sometimes our lunch will consist of nothing more than the focaccia , hot from the oven , dip in olive oil color .

TheSweet Potato Sugar Breadmakes 12 generous part . It can be serve up alone , or mob in tiffin , but I also care to sport this for a brunch crowd , with a yield grade and an potpourri of hot potable — coffee tree , teas , chew over cider , and spicy chocolate for the kids . It also makes a good potluck afters .

My advice about baking all of these recipes is this : Pull them out of the oven as closelipped to mealtime as possible . Otherwise you go the very real risk that they ’ll disappear before you have a chance to do them .

Fast forward a few thousand years to Cincinnati 1865 when Austro - Hungarian stillmaster Charles Fleischmann visited for his sister ’s hymeneals and declare poor yeast the reasonableness for down - tone American bread . At the fourth dimension , Yank favored table salt - rise bread , while southerners were devoted to baking - pop hot breads . barm for baking was skimmed from potato water or vats of ale .

Fleischmann change all that . He and his brother Maximilian emigrate to the United States and start create compressed Fleischmann ’s yeast , which they sell to housewives by sawhorse and paddy wagon . In 1870 , they started wrap it in tin foil , allowing lading anywhere . To give this new - fangled leavening agent a boost , Fleischmann bring an Austrian bread maker to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and place up a model Viennese bakeshop so fairgoers could see , smack , and taste the delightful hypothesis of baking with yeast . The rest , as they say , is history .

by Ken HaedrichOctober 1997from issue # 11

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These harvest breads are so good, so attractive, and so good for you, that your main problem will be keeping up with the demand.Photo/Illustration: Susan Kahn

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