I'll have to try Quick Bread another day.

With a narrow window with which to bake something yesterday, I turned to a Quick Bread to avoid the rising time needed for a yeast dough. With not a lot of ingredients on hand, I took a chance on an experiment with a whole wheat quick bread.

Quick bread is a type of bread that doesn't use yeast as a leavening agent. Instead, a chemical leavener like baking soda is used in combination with and acid like lemon juice or buttermilk. Or even water will work to create a reaction that produces carbon dioxide to raise the dough a little bit. Common baked goods that are quick breads are: brownies, biscuits, scones, irish soda bread, etc.

I took a fairly non-traditional recipe for a vegan quick bread and made it even more wild. Here it is (but I don't suggest you use it):

In a large bowl:
1 C Whole Wheat flour
3/4 C Brown Rice flour
1/4 C Flaxseed meal
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 tsp xanthan gum (a thickener, since I used a rice flour which is generally less elastic than wheat flour)

In a smaller bowl:
1 C soy milk
1 T vegetable oil
1 1/2 T agave syrup (honey can be used too)

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees. Mix together the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separately. Stir wet stuff into the dry. The resulting dough is wet and thick. Great. Place on a greased baking sheet and cook for 20 minutes or until the bread sounds "hollow" wet the bottom is tapped.

And, oh dear, where to start? The original recipe called for half whole wheat and half oat flour. I think I made a mistake by substituting rice and flax... the dough didn't rise very much (which I thought was fine because quick breads are dense). The dough might have been too wet because it sucked up the oil as it cooked and then fused to the pan! Horrible. Lacking finesse, I tore the bread in half when trying to remove it from the sheet after 25 minutes of cooking. After a period of 10-15 minutes cooking my curiosity had gotten the best of me, so I sliced into the loaf to find  the most doughy center I've ever seen for such a brown (and close to overcooked) crust.

So I'll have to try this again another time and follow the original recipe a little more closely. On a different note, here is a picture of our new kitchen. You also have a peek at the dining room/living room area:

What you can't see is the washer/dryer bhind me in the lower right corner and the bathroom door behind and to the left. What you CAN see is proof that this is indeed a basement with the outline of the stairs in the upper right and a large white air duct to the upper left. Woo! Basement.