Actually, I don’t need money, but I do need a favor. Now that Life has settled down some, I recently grew a new starter. It took a while to get off the ground, but yesterday I was able to use it to bake my STILL favorite Norwich Sourdough. It was good. Crusty, and tangy enough so you know it’s sourdough at first bite.

Now it turns out this particular bake seems to have sparked a friendly dispute about the uses and misuses of a crusty sourdough loaf. I won’t tell you which side of this bet I’m on, but the question is this: is a loaf like Norwich Sourdough properly deployed in a PB&J? Is the combination perfection itself, or is that just nuts?

I’d be ever grateful if you’d respond. (No pressure to do so, of course, but consider that the stakes here might or might not involve me having to shave my head, and winter is coming.) And as a bribe bonus for having read this far even though I’m that annoying relative who completely doesn’t deserve it, explain your answer in the comments and I’ll enter you into a random drawing to win my extra copy of The Village Baker by Joe Ortiz. Thank you! Update: Giveaway has closed, but voting and commenting is still open. PB&J on sourdough appears to be a thing for most of you!

This is the recipe I said I would not post. It’s the recipe for the cranberry bread I’ll be serving for Thanksgiving this year.

Three years ago I wrote (and re-posted for the two years following that) about why I never changed Thanksgiving dinner, why it had been the same reliable cranberry bread for years (along with the same turkey, the same stuffing, and the same potatoes), and would be for years to come. It was the recipe from the back of the bag of Ocean Spray cranberries; you could get it there if you wanted it, and I wasn’t about to go messing with it.

So this year, I messed with it, a little. Added some whole wheat flour. Took away some sugar. Made the loaf a little bigger. Converted everything into grams because that just feels better to me. Call it fine tuning.

In the scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. And by the scheme of things, I mean that for the past year — and for the first time ever in my life — my household has consisted of just me. Throw a new home, graduating from baking school, and becoming adept at toilet repairs into the scheme, and messing with a cranberry bread recipe is just not that big a deal.

It’s all good, because even really fine, reliable traditions can use a little fine tuning every once in a while, and even really fine lives can withstand some major turbulence.  Because even when the bread changes, the house changes, the life changes, and the plumbing breaks, I still have so much to be thankful for. (And if it makes anyone feel any better, I didn’t change the stuffing recipe at all.)

Have a beautiful Thanksgiving, everyone!

Cranberry Bread

This bread freezes well. I suggest slicing it before freezing; once thawed, wrap it in foil and put it in a 350F oven for 10 minutes right before serving.

Yield: one 10 x 5-inch loaf

Time:

• Prep and mix: 15 minutes
• Bake: 55 minutes

Ingredients:

• 169 g flour
• 135 g whole wheat flour
• 200 g sugar
• 6.6 g (1-1/8 t.) salt
• 2.5 g (1/2 t.) baking soda
• 6 g (1-3/4 t.) baking powder
• 31 g butter, melted
• 55 g egg (one large), beaten
• 195 g orange juice
• 6 g orange zest (from one medium orange)
• 188 g cranberries, very coarsely chopped
• 65 g walnuts, very coarsely chopped

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F, or 325F if you have a convection setting.
2. Butter a 10 x 5-inch loaf pan. Line the bottom with parchment paper and butter the parchment.
3. In a medium bowl, combine the flours, sugar, salt, baking soda, and baking powder.
4. Add the butter, egg, orange juice, and orange zest; stir to combine.
5. Add the cranberries and walnuts; stir just until evenly distributed.
6. Spread the batter in the prepared pan and use a spatula to smooth the top.
7. Bake for about 55 minutes, until a bamboo skewer poked into the center of the loaf comes out clean.
8. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then remove and finish cooling on a wire rack.

I have long extolled the virtues of Stollen, the classic German holiday yeasted fruitcake, as not only one of the tastiest ways to get your holiday-bread-shaped-like-baby-Jesus-in-the-manger fix, but as an extremely easy and forgiving bread to make.

This was evident when my colleague Susan and I were charged with making the Stollen for our baking school graduation. We tossed all the ingredients into the mixer and turned our attention to the half-dozen or so other breads on our day’s agenda. Almost an hour later, our cries of “Aaaaahhhh, the Stollen!” brought our panicked instructor running, and once he determined that the bakery was not burning down, he shot us a glare that demanded to know why two grown women couldn’t manage to act more dignified (especially considering, I suppose, the hallowed origins of this bread). The forgotten Stollen, however, didn’t care at all; the mixer was chugging along, with the Stollen dough swirling cheerfully and patiently inside. Most breads are ruined by excessive mixing, but it was going to take much, much more to get this baby’s swaddling in a twist.

My Stollen this year proved itself, fittingly, to be further willing to forgive; I inadvertently left the egg out of the dough, and nothing bad happened. Butter, sugar, and rum-soaked fruit save one from a multitude of sins, it seems.

This year for the first time, I folded a small rope of marzipan inside each loaf. This is traditional in some versions, but not mandatory, so feel free to leave it out. Or use twice as much, if you prefer.

The shaping of the Stollen is slightly more involved than the mixing, but even here, whatever you do will be forgiven. (Remember: you have butter, sugar, rum-soaked fruits–and, of course, baby Jesus–on your side.) Once the dough has been divided, preshaped into balls and bench-rested, the shaping proceeds like this:

Form a blunt-ended batard and flatten it slightly with your hand. With a thin rolling pin or wooden spoon handle placed lengthwise and just off-center, press down firmly, separating the dough into two sections. Roll out the cleft connecting the sections so it is about an inch wide.

Roll marzipan (about 45 grams for a small loaf) into a rope about an inch shorter than the dough’s length. Place the marzipan rope in the cleft and tuck the dough up around the ends. Fold the smaller section of dough over to rest upon the larger one. If there are fruits on the surface, pick them off and tuck them back inside so they don’t burn during baking.

There’s cornbread — spongy, sweet, and efficiently leavened with baking powder — and there’s Corn Bread: hearty and crusty, with the hard-won flavor than can only be achieved with yeast and time. And then there are these Corn Bread Rolls, which are fun to shape, if not precise replicas of the ears of maize that represent a bountiful harvest. Or little lopsided footballs, depending on your preferred meaning of Thanksgiving. Or maybe both, like when my dad took me to the thrilling Nebraska Cornhuskers game in Lincoln on Thanksgiving in 1965.

May your holiday be filled with what gives you sustenance, people you love, a little bit of excitement, and appreciation of blessings and hard-won victories, whatever yours may be.

To make 12 “ears,” I divided the dough into 24 pieces of about 50 grams apiece, and rolled them on the counter under my cupped hand to form balls.

 After a 20-minute covered bench rest, the shaping fun begins. Each roll uses two dough balls. Flatten one ball into a disk about 4 inches in diameter. Roll the other ball to shape it into a point at one end.

Wrap the “husk” around the ear and pinch it closed at the fat end.

After the rolls have been proofed in a floured couche, arrange them on a semolina-dusted peel (as many as will fit on your baking stone at one time) before scoring the center portion of each roll in a crosshatch pattern to resemble kernels. Go quickly and don’t worry about being sloppy. No one will care.

The recipe makes 12 rolls, which just fit on my 15 x 23 inch baking stone. If your stone is smaller, bake them in two batches. It’s a little tricky to transfer the rolls from the peel to the stone while maintaining the space between them. Again, a quick jerk of the peel is better. But again, no one will care if  it’s not perfect.

Corn Bread Rolls

Yield: 12 rolls

Approximate Time:

• Mix/ferment sponge: 4-6 hours
• Mix final dough: 10 minutes
• First fermentation : 1 hour
• Preshape, rest, and shape: 35 minutes
• Proof: 1 hour
• Bake: 25 minutes

Desired dough temperature: 75F

Sponge Ingredients:

• 190 grams flour
• 83 grams coarsely-ground yellow cornmeal
• 144 grams water
• 2.5 grams (7/8 teaspoon) instant yeast

Final Dough Ingredients:

• 380 grams flour
• 166 grams coarsely-ground yellow cornmeal
• 313 grams water
• 16.5 grams (2 3/4 teaspoons) salt
• 73 grams olive oil
• 5.5 grams (1-7/8 teaspoons) instant yeast
• all of the sponge

Method:

1. Combine all of the sponge ingredients and mix just until just incorporated. Cover and let rest at room temperature (about 70F) for 4-6 hours. When the sponge is ready to use, it will be doubled in volume and the surface pebbled with bubbles.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook, combine all of the dough ingredients, holding back a little of the water. Mix in low speed to incorporate, adjusting  the water as needed to achieve a medium-soft dough consistency.
3. Continue mixing in low or medium speed to a medium level of gluten development. The graininess of the cornmeal will make it a bit challenging to pull a windowpane, but you should be able to do it if you’re gentle.
4. Transfer the dough to a lightly oiled container. Cover and ferment at room temperature for about an hour, until the dough volume increases by about half and it feels lively in your hands.
5. Turn the dough into a lightly floured counter and shape the ears as described above. Place them (right side up) on a floured couche.
6. Proof, covered, for about one hour, until the indentation left by a fingerprint fills in very slowly and about halfway.
7. Meanwhile, preheat the oven, with baking stone, to 475F. You will also need steam during the initial phase of baking, so prepare for this now.
8. Score the rolls as described above.
9. Once the rolls are in the oven, reduce the temperature to 450F. Bake for 8 minutes with steam, and another 17 minutes or so without steam, until the crust is golden brown.
10. Cool on a wire rack.