Apple Bread.

In one of those beautiful serendipitous research finds, just as I finished my search for a non-cakey, genuinely bread-y banana bread for yesterday’s post, I came across the following article in a 1938 edition of Popular Mechanics magazine (which also happens to fit beautifully also into my recent ‘recipes from non-traditional sources’ theme too!):

"Bread baked from apple flour is a tasty innovation in Seattle. Each one and one-half pound loaf contains the equivalent of a large apple. The milling of apples into flour was made possible by a vacuum dehydration process which reduces the moisture content to about one percent; the flour is then added to other dry ingredients used in the bread mix, including a proportion of wheat flour. Due to the presence of apple pectin, apple bread does not dry out like ordinary wheat breads and so can be used to the last slice. A ton of apple flour calls for fifteen tons of apples."

Someone in Seattle please tell me that this bread is still being made there, so I can book my flight immediately. What a gorgeous idea, isn’t it?

Most of us don’t have access to apple flour, and the production sounds beyond the scope of even the most enthusiastic home baker, so we must be content with apple bread made from pulp. At least the recipe for today is yeast-leavened, and has no added sugar, so would not be cake-y. I am definitely going to try this very soon.

Apple Bread.
Weigh seven pounds of fresh juicy apples, peel, core, and boil them to a pulp, being careful to use an enamelled saucepan, or a stone jar placed inside an ordinary saucepan of boiling water, otherwise the fruit becomes discoloured; mix the pulp with fourteen pounds of the best flour, put in the same quantity of yeast you would use in common bread, and as much water as will make it into a fine smooth dough; put it into a pan, and stand it in a warm place to rise; let it remain for twelve hours at least; form it into rather long-shaped loaves, and bake it in a lively oven. This bread is very much eaten in the south of Europe.
How to Cook Apples: shown in a hundred different ways of dressing that fruit … Georgiana Hill, , (London, 1865)

Quotation for the Day

Why do we need so many kinds of apples? Because there are so many folks. A person has a right to gratify his legitimate taste. If he wants twenty or forty kinds of apples for his personal use…he should be accorded the privilege. There is merit in variety itself. It provides more contact with life, and leads away from uniformity and monotony.
Liberty Hyde Bailey