Home › Date-Cocoanut › Date Fruit Bread
Date Fruit Bread
Make as for Bread for Fruit Toast (Introductory Recipes), and for each loaf allow and work in nearly a pint of chopped, stoned dates.
A one-line variation that depends entirely on a base bread recipe printed elsewhere in the book. What it really tells you is the proportion of fruit to dough, which is high.
- The base dough"Bread for Fruit Toast" in this book's introductory recipes. Look it up there rather than assuming its formula; a plain white yeast loaf is a reasonable stand-in.
- A pint of dates is a lotNearly a pint of chopped pitted dates weighs roughly 10 to 12 oz (300-340 g), a very large proportion against the flour in a single loaf. Expect a dense, sweet, slow-rising bread rather than an ordinary loaf with fruit in it.
- "Stoned"Simply pitted. Medjool or Deglet Noor both work; if the dates are hard and dry, a short soak in warm water and a thorough drain keeps them from stealing moisture from the dough.
- When to add the fruitWork the dates in at the end of kneading, or during a fold after the first rise. Adding them at the start shreds them into paste and the sugar released slackens the gluten.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature. Bake at around 375F rather than hotter: the sugar in the dates browns the crust before the crumb is set. Tent with foil if the top darkens early; the loaf is done at an internal 195-200F.
- Rise timeHeavily fruited dough proves noticeably more slowly. Judge by the dough, not the clock, and allow the second rise to go somewhat further than you would for plain bread.
- YieldOne loaf. The fruit and sugar should help it keep, and it toasts well, which is the point of the parent recipe.
Date breads and date-nut loaves appear all over American cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, and part of the explanation is often said to be commercial: packaged, pitted dates became a reliable pantry item once importers were shipping them in bulk from North Africa and the Persian Gulf, and the USDA's plant introductions of date palm offshoots to the desert valleys of California and Arizona are generally traced to the same period. Before that, dates are traditionally described as a Christmas-box luxury sold on the stem. A collection like this one appears to treat the date as an everyday baking ingredient on equal footing with apples and raisins — which was a fairly new thing to be able to assume. The recipe's terseness is also typical of the genre: the author expects you to have already mastered the introductory bread and to read this as a proportion rather than a procedure.