Developing a Whole Grain Recipe
On November 7, 2007, I opened an email and was surprised to read a note from a literary agent telling me that she had recently seen an article that was published about me in the Los Angeles Times featuring recipes that I developed using whole grain flours. When we met she asked if I had ever considered writing a cookbook, for which I hadn’t had the previous bandwidth. Without skipping a beat, I responded that it would be the perfect time to do so; three years into motherhood, caring for a baby and a toddler, I needed a creative outlet.
Developing recipes, for me, is a very thoughtful, structured process combined with a handful of whimsy. My Bakeshop staffs of past and present may beg to differ with this statement - now having to contend with my sharpie-scratched recipe parchment papers strewn throughout the bakery - but at that time, pre-bakery, it was very structured. For each recipe in the book, the process involved creating the bare bones “average recipe,” charting ingredients and measurement using white flour, then mix, bake, taste and critique, noticing characteristics during each step that would send me onto the next iteration. Then I would incorporate whole grains, testing two or three different ones to see which grain performed best, reacted the best, looked best and tasted best. I made innumerable tweaks, confident that I had explored every possibility and each pastry was exactly where I had envisioned it, before I would write up that recipe and move on to the next.
Those days provided challenging, satisfying mental work. My mind stretched as far as it could learning the nuances of each grain, the role of each ingredient in a recipe, and how each could be manipulated to achieve the desired appearance, flavor and crumb. I was building my foundation for understanding how ingredients and methods interacted with one another.
In the height of that next summer, I began work on a Summer Squash Loaf, a fancy name for Zucchini Bread. It was a simple one-bowl, stir-the-ingredients-together and bake kind of recipe. I wondered how I could take something traditional that so many know and take comfort in and somehow elevate it, using seasonal ingredients, without veering too far from the original favorite. First, I tinkered with the base ingredients: whether to use oil vs. butter, and if it were to be butter should it be melted or creamed; brown sugar vs. sugar, or both; putting in a rich dairy product like sour cream or yogurt vs. leaving it out, etc. Then, once I felt that I had that solid base I introduced the zucchini and had to decide whether it should be julienned or shredded, and if it should be squeezed of moisture or baked with the moisture left in. Most important for me, as is always the case, was which flour to use.
For this recipe, I decided to experiment with rye and spelt. Both are hearty flours that can stand up to the vegetal notes of zucchini while using their bitter, strong flavors to offset the overall sweetness of the bread. Because the book celebrates all grains and all of the inherent flavors and textures they bring to the pastries, I also chose to toss in a handful of wheat germ for added dimension. Eventually, satisfied with the structure, but not yet feeling like the bread really set itself far enough apart from the versions we all knew, I wandered out into my garden where basil and mint were growing in abundance. I snipped a handful of each, infused the chopped leaves into the melted butter and stirred them into the batter. The result was fresh; the herbal notes gave off an aromatherapy quality into the room as the cake baked. The finished cake had a soft and tender crumb, just sweet enough to feel like a treat, and with a healthy grainy texture. Eventually the name was changed to Zucchini Bread and put into the Rye chapter of my book, Good to the Grain.