Oatmeal Raisin Bread

One of the rituals that marks weekend-life these days is a Potluck. It has somehow become unacceptable if a Friday evening or Saturday evening is spent at home with a relaxing movie, or book, or just conversations. Weekends simply cannot end without socializing - that’s the unsaid rule :). So, almost every Friday evening, I find myself peering inside the pantry and the fridge, wondering what to make. This time, I leafed through William Sonoma’s Baking Book to find some inspiration, and came across a simple recipe for an Oatmeal Raisin Bread. But I had to tailor the recipe to fit the ingredients sitting in my pantry. So, here is my adapted version of the recipe.

Ingredients

1. 1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
2. 1 cup oats
3. ¾ cup raisins (I used golden raisins, for that’s what I had)
4. ¾ cup brown sugar (you can substitute this with regular white sugar as well, but since brown sugar has molasses, it gives a rich jaggery-like flavor)
5. 1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
6. 1 teaspoon baking soda
7. ½ teaspoon salt
8. 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
9. 1 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
10. ½ teaspoon of ground clove
11. 1 teaspoon of ground cardamom
12. ½ teaspoon ground allspice
13. 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
14. 2 Tablespoons of flax seed
15. ⅓ cup vegetable oil
16. ¾ cup unsweetened applesauce (if you don’t have applesauce, it’s easy enough to make it with apples)
17. ¾ cup buttermilk (or ½ cup of yogurt)

Preparation

Making applesauce:

1 medium sized apple yields about ½ cup of sauce. So for ¾ cup of applesauce, you’d need 2 apples. It’s not necessary to be overly precise about this. The more applesauce, the more moist the cake would be. Since I had no eggs, I had to add yogurt, applesauce, and flax seeds to make the bread relatively light and moist.

Peel, core, and dice the apples. Transfer them to a saucepan with ½ cup of water, and cook well on medium-high heat till the apples can be mashed. It takes about 40 minutes for the apples to cook well. I’m not a big fan of using the microwave to cook for prolonged periods of time, so I avoid it.  A pressure-cooker will be ideal for this. The mashed apples = applesauce. 

 
Preparing the bread:

1. In a deep bowl, mix together the flour, oats, raisins, brown sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, clove, and cardamom. If you’re not a fan of these spices, you can skip them. But I love these spices. They infuse so much flavor to the oats and the bread. Besides, I find every chance to finish these spices that seem to be residing in the pantry forever.
2. In a separate bowl, mix two tablespoons of ground flax seed with 6 tablespoons of warm water, and whisk well. Microwave this for 30 seconds and whisk it vigorously till it becomes sticky and frothy. Let it cool.
3. Make a “well” in the centre of the dry ingredients. Into this centre, pour the oil, yogurt, applesauce, vanilla essence, and the whisked flax seed concoction.
4. Slowly combine the wet and dry ingredients, and mix just until evenly combined. Do not over-mix, or vigorously stir. Doing so will make your bread dense.
5. Grease a 9 by 5 inch loaf pan, and spoon out the batter into it. The batter will be thick, so not to worry.
6. Bake for 30-40 minutes (or till a cake-tester comes clean) at 350 F.
7. Wait for the bread to cool, run a knife around the edges of the pan and gently tilt out the bread.

Since this bread has oatmeal, raisin, and flax seed, it is an ideal breakfast item. I would even call this reasonably “healthy” since it uses very little oil. Two slices of this bread fill you up well. As a dessert, it goes well with ice-cream. What doesn’t go well with ice-cream? ;)