I finished a jar of pickles the other day and was trying to figure out what to do with the half a jar of pickle juice that was left behind so I didn't have to just pour it down the drain. I thought maybe you could use it instead of water to make bread with a pickle flavor to it. I thought it may be good for sandwiches where you're normally add pickles, or even for cheeseburger pizza crust. So, is this a completely horrible idea (like my wife thinks), or could it work?
Baking – use the juice from pickles to make bread
bakingbreadsubstitutions
Related Solutions
The purpose of the beer (and the vinegar) in this case is to add some of the malty, fermenty flavors typical of longer-fermented or sourdough breads. You can either leave it out and replace it with an equal quantity of water or use a non-alcoholic beer
The carbonation from the beer might add a little extra lift at the start to establish some air cells and work the gluten a bit, but with an 18 hour room-temperature bulk rise, that benefit would be negligible. In most beers (especially large US commercial bottlers) there isn't enough active yeast left in the bottle by the time it is drunk to do anything either.
The author of the original article (Cook's Illustrated #90, Jan 2008) added the beer and vinegar in order to add flavor to a bread recipe that already produced decent bread.
My bread now had tang [from the vinegar], but it lacked complexity. What I needed was a concentrated shot of yeasty flavor. As I racked my brain, I realized that beyond bread, there is another commonly available substance that relies on yeast for flavor: beer.
As DrRandy said in the comments, cookies are really far from banana bread. It's going to be pretty difficult. I would suggest instead looking for a banana cookie recipe. Even if you don't like the first one you find, you can use it as a starting point or find another, and you'll go through a lot fewer failed batches than you will if you try to start from your banana bread recipe.
If you do start from a banana cookie recipe, the things you'd most likely want to modify:
- adding more chocolate chips - just do it
- adding more chocolate flavor - replace a bit of flour with cocoa powder
- adding more banana flavor - you can try adding additional banana puree and flour to compensate for the water, but it'll make the cookies more cakey and crumbly, less chewy. You can also just use banana extract.
If you do try to convert it into a bona fide cookie recipe, I'm pretty sure you'll discover fairly quickly that the idea doesn't make a lot of sense. In order to make a cookie recipe, you're going to take all the ingredients besides bananas and chocolate and completely change their ratios. To figure out how to do that, you'll use a cookie recipe - so you'll be converting a cookie recipe into a banana cookie. You'll have to reduce the amount of bananas , too, because a cookie can't hold that much liquid. No matter how you get there, all that'll be left of your banana bread recipe is the fact that what you baked contains bananas, chocolate chips, and cocoa powder.
So to try to answer your specific questions:
(how to convert) If I had to guess, I'd say the best starting point might be a chocolate chip cookie recipe that uses melted butter. You could replace half of the butter with bananas and see what happens. From there you could possibly add additional banana and flour, turning it into a cakier cookie with more banana flavor. And to get cocoa powder in, just replace a bit of flour with it. But why not instead start from an existing banana cookie recipe? It'll be much closer to what you want, much less trial and error. And I don't really see any way to think of this as modifying the banana bread recipe; you need a cookie base for your cookies.
(will they be like bread) Well, if you just tried to make cookies using your existing recipe, yes, they'll be like bread. If you use a cookie dough as the basis, they'll be more like cookies.
(temperature and time) No matter what you do, the time will be way shorter (smaller things cook through faster). You probably won't have to adjust the temperature that much, maybe 25 degrees either way depending on the kind of cookie you decide to make.
(is the consistency important) Totally subjective. If you want to make something that's obviously a cookie, well, the consistency is the big difference between a cookie and a quick bread. If you want it to be easier to keep (not crumbly, less moist so it won't mold) then again, that's all about consistency. If all you want is to make something that tastes good, it doesn't matter at all. You can spoon sufficiently thick quick bread/muffin batter onto a baking sheet and bake it, and you'll get basically muffin tops.
Related Topic
- Baking – make a baking form from
- Baking – Can you make bread with the yeast in beer
- Use instead of clam juice
- Baking – Issue getting Atta bread right
- Baking – use less sugar for making this bread
- Baking – Why not make sourdough bread from young starter
- Bread and butter pudding – but with juice
- Bread – Can you make vegan garlic bread? If so, how does the use of margarine effect taste and texture
Best Answer
You don't have to use water as the liquid in your bread. Enriched breads use milk and/or eggs. We have recently had questions about breads which use orange juice.
On the technical side, you have to adjust recipe a little. Pickle juice doesn't have much dissolved solids, so no need to adjust for that. However, it is very salty, so you should reduce or completely leave out the salt. The acidity will help with gluten development and also with breaking down the starches in flour to make them available for chemical reactions which produce more flavour, so this is a good thing to have. However, yeast itself has some strong pH preferences. It grows best in a slightly acidic environment, but if the dough gets too basic or too sour, it will slow down or not grow at all. I think that the diluted vinegar in the pickle water won't oversour the dough, but it would be a good idea to make the poolish with pure water and only add pickle water for the dough itself.
As for taste, I can't say that much without ever having tried it, but my intuition says that you will get a whiff of pickles, but not a full-blown taste. After all, bread made with orange juice doesn't taste like biting into an orange. I think you will notice the difference, but you will still have to add pickles to your sandwiches for taste (and they are needed for the crunch anyway). As for horrible, it depends entirely on personal taste. I am not a fan of pickles or soured breads, and wouldn't eat it. There are people who drink the pickle water from the jar; I think they will enjoy the pickle-smelling bread too. If you are a pickle fan, I think it is worth a try, if it doesn't work, you only throw out under a dollar's worth of ingredients.