Fall Food: Sweet Loaves

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and to close out the show each day during the Pledge Drive, we're going to talk about full food with the video host and cookbook author Carla Lalli.

Her latest book is Food is a Feeling, and it's part cookbook, part memoir. She writes about how cooking helped her get through her divorce, along with other things. Yesterday we talked about kitchen sink soup, right? The kind of dinner you can throw together with whatever leftover produce and pantry items you have lying around your house.

So now we will be digging in, pun intended, to a sweet fall staple, loaves. Although in fairness, the kind of loaves I'm talking about are often actually called breads, banana bread, pumpkin bread, zucchini bread, apple bread. Okay, that one should definitely be called an apple loaf. But whatever you want to call it, today's installment of our fall food series is focused on anything you would bake in a loaf pan. And it's worth noting this genre of baked goods is a lot more beginner-friendly than say pastry. So if you consider yourself more of a cook than a baker, but you're looking to make something sweet this week, look no further. We've got our expert here to give us the low down on loaves, the loaf down, I don't know, I shouldn't call it a loaf down. Carla, welcome back. Thanks again for joining us for this Fall Food series.

Carla Lalli Music (1:28)

Hi again.

Brian Lehrer (1:30)

So you've got a pretty interesting banana bread recipe in your new cookbook. That's a little different than the usual banana bread formula we're used to seeing. Tell us about that.

Carla Lalli Music (1:39)

That is true. I made it last night. I had all colors of bananas, brown, black, semi-liquid. And so what I love about this recipe is it combines cocoa, which cocoa, you know, chocolate and banana is great, and then also has peanuts on top, which we're always putting walnuts and pecans in our banana bread, but banana, peanut butter, I just was sure somebody had done it and apparently nobody had.

And what I love about baking in the fall is like the house just smells so good, and then you get to have cake for breakfast.

Brian Lehrer (2:18)

Cake for breakfast. And I mentioned a few kinds of loaves in the intro, banana, also pumpkin, zucchini, apple. Are there certain fruits or veggies that you reach for when making a loaf in addition to bananas?

Carla Lalli Music (2:31)

Yeah, I think one of the things about the fall fruits and vegetables, the squash, the apples, the pears, they're all delicious in these kinds of bakes. I don't think they're necessarily interchangeable. And so especially for beginner bakers, there's two books that I wanted to call out specifically. One is called Snacking Cakes by Yosia Refi. I pulled both of these off my shelf last night. And the other one is Snackable Bakes by Jesse Sheehan. And what's great about these is that, you know, the thing about baking for a lot of people is the equipment.

And these are very minimal equipment, no stand mixer. You can use an 8x8 kind of brownie pan and don't need a lot of stuff. And both of them have not only loaves, but like bars and things that go in a square pan, which I find just like very accessible, very easy.

The downside with some of this baking, and I found this with like zucchini bread, any kind of those bumper crops, you think that making a loaf is gonna use up like a ton of the veg or the fruit that you have. And a lot of times it's like two apples.

So you're gonna be left with like a lot of fruit that is sometimes like not as satisfying. So I might go out on a little bit of a limb and say, in addition to the loaves and the banana breads, the apple breads and the cakes, things that use a lot of fruit. And one of those is applesauce. And if you have not made fresh applesauce in a while, not only does it take a lot of, you can use a ton of apples, but warm applesauce on like a bowl of yogurt is sublime. And we're not having it enough. So that will use your whole like four pounds of apples that you got from your apple picking.

Brian Lehrer (4:29)

Are there fruits or veggies that you should maybe avoid when making a loaf?

Carla Lalli Music (4:34)

I think that you need to follow recipes for this. So you know, zucchini is very like high liquid, whereas something like squash, a winter squash, has low moisture. So you can't go interchangeable. I think you can interchange an apple and a pear.