Apple Bread
With my surplus of apples hanging around here, I decided to have a go at the Chopped Apple Bread recipe from The Complete Book of Breads
Again, I altered the recipe a bit and used half whole wheat. I haven’t had any problems doing this in any of the bread recipes I’ve tried so far. I usually add the half into the first mixing of the dough and let it beat the full 3 minutes usually allowed instead of simply moving on once it’s all blended. Then when it comes time to add flour until the right consistency is reached, I use white. I also use white for dusting the counter and all that, of course.
So, on to the chopped bread. Well, you make the bread dough, let it rise, chop the apples, then roll out the dough, top it with the apples and a bit of brown sugar and cinnamon, fold it together and begin chopping it with a knife to combine it. It’s a mess. It’s not much sugar and a lot of it gets into the actual dough while chopping, so that the bread really is like a bread and not a rolled bread with pockets of sugar. Once you’ve chopped up the dough, you toss it haphazardly into greased bread pans, let it rise in the pan, and then bake. The bread itself is absolutely normal-looking bread with chunks of apples baked into it, but the top is a funky chunky shape since the different sized and placed pieces retained their shape on the top of the loaf though they melded in the middle.
I forgot the walnuts that were supposed to be added with the apples, but the rest of my family probably thanks me for it. I hate wasting walnuts on the ungrateful. If I add walnuts to a loaf I’ll have to greedily reserve it for myself alone. :)
I doubled the recipe and got 5 loaves out of it, I froze several and they have come out of the freezer perfectly. I will definitely make this loaf again.
