With quick breads (e.g. banana bread, zucchini muffins, pancakes), it's all about the mixing. The goal is to get the ingredients well-combined with as little gluten development as possible. Gluten is the protein in flour that's responsible for making yeast bread stretchy enough to hold little bubbles of air. But stretchy quick bread? Yuck! Quick bread should be tender and soft, not stretchy, tough, or gluey. Gluten: good for yeast bread, bad for quick bread.
Gluten develops when you mix the flour with a liquid. The longer and harder you mix, the more the gluten develops. So, the key to tender quickbread is to mix it as little as possible once the liquid hits the flour.
And with that highly scientific introduction, here are some tips for baking delicious quickbreads.
- I use the basic two-bowl method: a big bowl for the dry ingredients (flour, salt, leavening, sugar, etc.) and a small bowl for the wet ingredients (eggs, butter, oil, bananas, zucchini, buttermilk, yogurt, sour cream, milk, water, vanilla, etc.).
- For dry ingredients, you need to get the leavening (baking soda or powder) evenly incorporated into the other ingredients. Many recipes call for sifting the dry ingredients together, but this is a pretty lame method. For one thing, sifters are a PITA. More importantly, it doesn't do a very good job of distributing the leavening. You could whip out your blender or food processor, but ... why go to the trouble?
My preferred method is to just grab my Really Big Whisk (RBW) and beat the dry ingredients together for almost a minute. In the big bowl.
- For the wet ingredients, many recipes have you add them individually to the dry ingredients. This is BAD. If your wet ingredients include eggs, there's almost no way to avoid overmixing with this approach. And remember, overmixing = gluten development = BAD.
Instead, put all your wet ingredients into one bowl, get a nice wooden spoon, and mix them till they're well blended. In the medium bowl. (A few ingredients can benefit from being prepared separately: It's a little anal, but I like to beat my eggs together before adding them to the wet bowl. And of course you want to mash your bananas up before pouring in the eggs, butter, and other wet stuff).
- Now, the really important part. Pour your wet ingredients into your dry ingredients. Take your Really Big Whisk, and gently, carefully, and mindfully combine wet with dry. Scoop the whisk along the bottom of the bowl to pull up as much unmixed flour as possible. You should be all done after 10-15 strokes. Srsly. Stop now. Stop! (If you see light sprays of flour in your batter, that's fine. Just leave them).
- If you want to add nuts, chips, or other extras, add them to the dough about 2/3 of the way through mixing.
And those are my mixing tips. Now, a baking tip:
- Don't use nonstick baking pans (or cookie sheets for that matter). The dark coating that makes them non-stick also makes the pan hotter, resulting in an overcooked bottom and sides. Instead, use plain metal pans, like the excellent ones from Chicago Metallics. Then how do you keep your bread from sticking? You have lots of options: butter and flour your pan just like Mom used to do, spray it with Pam or Bakers' Joy, or do like I do and line the pan with parchment paper (which gives you the added benefit of an origami project as you try to fit the paper into the pan). If you're making muffins, liner cups are a good option.
To recap:
- Go shopping and treat yourself to a really big whisk and an untreated loaf pan or muffin tin
- Mix your wet ingredients and dry ingredients separately
- Mix wet and dry ingredients together until just barely combined -- about 10-15 strokes of the whisk.
Happy baking!
