Anyone with a bare minimum skill in the kitchen can master quick breads. If you don’t make a mistake in following the recipe, if your ingredients are not ancient (especially the baking powder), if your oven temperature is within 25º of what the dial indicates and if you take the bread out of the oven on time, you’ve mastered quick breads.
The variety of quick breads is enormous depending on what flavoring agent you use. From fresh or dried fruit to vegetables, nuts, or often a combination of these are examples. The type of flour and fats or oil, the liquid and the sweetening agent also vary.
Eggs not only hold the bread together but enrich it in flavor and nutrition. Plain quick breads without at least some added flavorings are too bland, yet they are fine to accompany a meal with butter and perhaps jam, marmalade or honey.
All quick breads use the same type of viscous batter. Preparation is user-friendly, ideal for beginners in the kitchen, even young children. Combine all the dry ingredients in a sifter, including dry flavorings like cinnamon and nutmeg, and sift into a bowl.
Combine all liquid ingredients, including eggs and any liquid flavorings like vanilla in another bowl, then lightly mix the wet into the dry. You may add chopped fruits, nuts, grated vegetables or whatever the recipe calls for at any time in this process. An important part is to mix lightly, just until the ingredients are combined.
To much mixing toughens the final product, and that is about the only thing you have to be careful about. Too much mixing is beginners’ downfall and the bread turns out dense and dry. Never use a food processor to mix a quick bread dough.
Pour the batter into a greased pan and bake. After it is done, a quick bread is ready to eat it at once, though it is easier to slices if you let the bread cool a little.
If you overbake your quick bread, it gets too dry. If you underbake it, the center is still soft and doughy. Set your timer 5 to 10 minutes earlier than the recipe calls for, and start testing the bread with a toothpick or bamboo skewer at that point.
As soon as the tester comes out clean, the bread is ready. A thermometer registering 190°F (90°C) in the center is also a good testing device.
Quick breads don’t have a delicate structure like cakes do, they won’t collapse or fall when disturbed. You can go ahead and dance in the kitchen while your quick bread is baking, even if your floor is quite bouncy. The bread won’t mind it (though your neighbors might).
Why do some recipes call for baking powder and baking soda? When a sour ingredient is part of the dough-buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream or sour milk-the dough needs both leaveners.
Baking powder was designed for a neutral batter, so if it contains additional acid ingredients, you need something to neutralize it or the chemical reactions are unbalanced. That is what the baking soda does.
The sour liquids in the recipe promote a lighter bread and are the basis for another chemical reaction that produce bubbles. Recipes with sour ingredient always call for baking soda.
Should you change a recipe and substitute sweet milk for any of the sour products, be sure to omit the baking soda. You can also substitute sour liquids for sweet, for example, sour milk or yogurt for milk, sour cream for sweet cream.
But make sure you add baking soda in the ratio of ½ teaspoon for every cup of the sour liquid. Because the baking soda combines with the sour liquid and generates carbon dioxide gas bubbles, you don’t need as much baking powder in the recipe– reduce it slighlty.
The amount of chemical leavening in quick breads is critical. If you don’t add enough, you won’t get the gas bubbles light breads require. If you add too much, all the chemicals don’t completely neutralize during the mixing and baking, and your bread ends up with a chemical or bitter soapy taste.
Too little mixing, so you don’t distribute the chemicals evenly throughout the dough produces the same effect. You remember the church potluck when that wonderful-looking zucchini bread had such a bitter favor? That is what caused it.
Hopefully it wasn’t your zucchini bread!