We’re all familiar with banana bread, but did you know that you can make a delicious and sweet bread using apples? Most recipes call for applesauce or shredded apples but when I was making apple juice in my juicer a few years ago and thought that the pulp that was left behind would be perfect. As it turns out, I was right, and my homemade apple bread recipe was born.
Start by preheating the oven to 350 degrees and creaming 1/2 cup (or a stick) of butter or margarine in a mixer with 3/4 cup of sugar.
You could do this by hand, but I’m lazy and there’s a perfectly good stand mixer on the counter so I’ll be doing it the easy way this time around, mmmkay?
Once the butter and sugar are properly creamed and crumbly, add 2 eggs and 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract.
I tried to get fancy with this shot, but cracking an egg with one hand and taking a photo with the other is a bit more complicated than I’d imagined, so there is no action shot here. Sorry.
In a separate bowl, combine 2 cups all purpose flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon baking soda.
Sure you could skip this step, but it gets the dry ingredients mixed really well before they go into the wet stuff, so just do it. Trust me, it is the right thing to do.
Add the dry ingredients to the mixer along with 3/4 cup orange juice and 1 cup of apple. Your apples can be in the form of applesauce, chopped apples, reconstituted dried apple or the leavings from your juicer (as shown above).
Don’t discriminate and don’t judge. Use what you got, honey.
Finally, toss in about 1/3 cup of chopped nuts if you want.
Maybe you don’t like nuts. Maybe you like walnuts. It’s your party, you can nut if you want to. Wait, that came out wrong.
Now that the hard part is over, scrape the mixture into a greased bread pan that’s about 9” x 5” and spread it around until it’s even. Slide it into the oven and bake for 1 hour at 350 degrees. When you do it right, your awesomeness will be rewarded with something that looks like this:
Give it a shot and let me know what you think!