Canadian Maple Brown Bread

So much has been written about bread that I haven’t a lot to add except to say that I was appalled when the low-carb diet craze demonized bread. Bread? The staff of life? Now we know that bread made from whole grains and baked with loving hands at home is not bad for one’s health. Actually, recent nutritional studies have found that bread is a very valuable food and that the use of whole grains and other add-ins (such as fruit and nuts) only adds to that nutritional worth. Thank Goodness. The other health benefit is the warm, homey, good feelings we get from the aroma and taste of freshly homemade bread. Think stress reduction.


Our ancestors never doubted the value of bread. It has been around for thousands of years. I’m not sure how the first man figured out to grind the grains they found growing wild and mixing the result with water and baking it in the sun on a flat stone but historians tell us that that’s how it all probably began. It used to be a formidable task—even as recently as our grandmothers who baked bread for a week for a family—usually on Saturday. Today we can use our heavy-duty mixers or breadmakers (on the “dough” setting) to mix and knead and (in the case of the breadmaker) raise the bread in a nice, warm environment.

But even if you don’t bake your bread using machines to help, it is a labor of love and therapy. Kneading yeast breads and feeling the springy, smooth, fragrant and live dough beneath your fingers is gratifying as few other cooking tasks are. One of my cookbooks says, “The satisfaction of producing a fine loaf is a thrill hardly possible to exaggerate.”

It took me several years to learn to make good yeast bread. I was probably intimidated a little by my mom who won blue ribbons for her bread when she was just a teen and always made it look simple, but never really taught me how. She was not one to measure or write down directions and so my first loaves as a bride turned out like bricks and I didn’t know why. I finally asked her to show me, step-by-step, how she did it and talk me through how she knew when the water was the right temperature so as not to kill the yeast (what I had evidently been doing to produce those “bricks”), how to tell when the dough was kneaded just right—and also how to tell when it was done. Now I can bake a pretty mean loaf.

While working on a cookbook entitled The Thrifty, Healthy Kitchen, I costed out the price of a 1 ½ pound loaf of part white, part whole wheat bread with some shortening and sweetener in it. The cost was about $0.48. In today’s world, that’s pretty inexpensive for a wonderful loaf of bread—so I decided to bake all our bread. Since I had picked up a hand-written cookbook at the Library’s book sale last week called “A Diary of Bread 100 ways 100 Days” I got the brilliant idea to start at the beginning and bake a bread a day. Well, almost a bread a day—there are days when I simply can’t. What to do with all that bread? I am using it for my breakfasts, ourselves, the freezer and as gifts. It’s amazing how welcome a loaf of homemade bread is! I am going to keep my readers abreast of my 100 loaves of bread by writing about the most outstanding once a month and sharing what I am learning about baking bread. The first is Canadian Maple Brown Bread

Canadian Maple Brown Bread

¾ cup uncooked rolled oats
1 ¼ cup boiling water
1 package active dry yeast
¼ cup warm water (105 to 115)
¼ tsp. sugar
¼ tsp. ginger
½ cup milk
1/3 cup maple syrup
¼ cup brown sugar
¼ cup butter
2 tsp. salt
5 cups unbleached white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
½ cup golden raisins
Maple syrup and turbinado sugar for glaze

Combine oats and 1 ¼ cups boiling water in a small bowl. Cover and let stand 20 minutes. Dissolve yeast, ginger and sugar in warm water in a large bowl; let stand until bubbly, about 5 minutes. Combine milk, 1/3 cup maple syrup, brown sugar, butter and salt in small pan. Heat over low heat until butter is melted. Cool to lukewarm. Stir into yeast. Stir in oats mixture. Mix in flour and raisins to make a stiff dough. Turn dough onto floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. (Alternatively, use dough hook of heavy-duty electric mixer and knead about 10 minutes.) Place in greased bowl; turn greased side up. Cover; let rise in a warm place until double ( 1 ½ hours). Punch down and divide in half. Shape in 2 greased loaf pans. Cover; let rise until double (about 1 ½ hours). Heat oven to 350 degrees. Bake 40 to 45 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from pans. Brush tops with maple syrup and sprinkle with turbinado or maple sugar while still warm. Cool on wire rack.