My plan for last night was to make Banana Bread, but the bananas I bought on Sunday refused to cooperate and ripen fast enough. Since we are having a cheese ravioli dish with apples and walnuts tonight, I happened to have all the ingredients on hand to make Raw Apple Bread instead.
Here are the ingredients:
Although there are two apples pictured, I only needed one to get the 1 cup of chopped apple called for. Also, I didn’t have any buttermilk so instead I used regular milk with a dash of lemon juice.
The texture of the Raw Apple Bread dough was very unique–it was more like a cookie dough (it also tasted like cookie dough. Yes, I know that it’s a bad idea to eat raw eggs, but I can never pass up the heavenly taste of cookie dough).
Since this bread used a whole stick of butter, I greased my pan using the butter wrapper. It was quite a task to get all of the dough out of the bowl and into the pan, since the dough was so thick. I finally scraped it all into the pan in somewhat of a loaf shape, and set my oven timer for 10 minutes less than the minimum time the recipe called for (40 minutes versus 50 minutes).
As it baked, the bread smelled like a wonderful mixture of sugar cookies and applesauce.
I tested the loaf at 40 minutes, 45 minutes, and 48 minutes using a cake tester; it was done at 48 minutes. Beard writes that the bread “will be better if left to mature for at least 24 hours.” I was able to restrain myself from eating it straight out of the oven, but I wasn’t able to pass up having a few pieces for breakfast.
Beard refers to this bread as “unusual” but “delightfully textured and interesting in color and flavor.” It is a very dense bread with a crispy crust, and is very sweet–more of a dessert bread than something one would eat with a meal (of course, I did not let that stop me from eating it for breakfast anyway). The apple flavor is subtle, which may simply be a reflection of the type of apple I used, Pink Ladies. Because this bread does not have any cinnamon or nutmeg, it doesn’t have the taste one typically associates with apple baked goods. The walnuts provide a savory flavor, and as mentioned before, there is quite a bit of sugar.
Overall, this recipe was easy to prepare and produced a very unique, and yes, delightful, bread.
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