Monkeybread

A luxury bread that takes a while to prepare but is essentially, pastry-crack. I'm still in the process of figuring out the best ingredient proportions and baking methods.

Ingredients

For the dough

• 3 to 3 1/2 cups all purpose flour, divided
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 package dry yeast
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup butter or margarine, melted and divided
• 1 egg, beaten

For the filling

• 4-8 cooking apples, peeled and chopped
• around 1 2/3 cups sugar
• around 1 cup finely chopped pecans
• 1-2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

For the baking

• about half a cup of melted butter
• Baked at 350F for 50-70min

Procedure

It's important to prepare this recipe in the order specified below.

Combine 3 cups of flour with the sugar, yeast, and salt in the mixing bowl. Chop the butter up and put it into the milk then microwave it slowly until the butter just melts.

Mix this into the flour along with the egg until you've got a stiff dough. The amount of dough produced is a bit too small for my mixer so I had to pull it out and finish kneading it on the counter.

This isn't a bad thing. Kneading it by hand means you can judge the wetness of the dough better. Ideally you want the dough to still feel moist without being sticky. This gives the yeast some room to work on the flour. If the dough is too dry it won't rise as well.

Put the dough into a bowl, cover it with plastic, and set it aside while you prepare the filling (or 20min).

Chop up the pecans to small pieces. Think peppercorn sized. Put them into a larger bowl.

Peel your apples, divide into fourths, and remove the seeds and naughty bits. I always run out of apple mixture in the end and this time I thought I had more than enough but it turned out to be slightly short. I have no way to judge these things. See my small apples? You probably want one or two more than this.

After cleaning the apples, cut them into cubic centimeter sized chunks and throw them into the bowl.

Here you can see how much the dough has risen while cutting apples.

Mix the sugar and cinnamon into the apple pecan mixture. Sugar is hygroscopic and the little crystals are sharp. The grains will puncture the cell walls and suck out the juices. This creates an ambrosiac syrup.

Stir the mixture until the surface appears a bit wet - then stop. Just sitting on the counter, the sugar will continue to draw out juice.

Start making little pancakes with the dough.

Break off a small bit of dough and roll it into a ball. It should still be slightly moist. Slap it down on the counter, optionally shouting out 'HA!' as you do this, then dip your hand the flour bowl and pat the upper surface. This ensures the dough won't stick to your rolling pin and will stay on the countertop. Roll the dough into round pancakes.

In these pictures I've made the pancakes almost twice as large as you probably want. Smaller pancakes are more work but they taste better in the end.

Stack all the pancakes off to the side as you make them.

Finally, pick up a pancake, stretch it out if it's contracted (it won't if you let it sit long enough), and put some apple mixture in the center. It's very important you don't touch the apple solution or let it slop over the edge of the pancake because the sides won't stick together. If you have to sample the apple filling, I suggest putting your face into the bowl.

Pinch the edges up to make an apple filled purse and put them into another larger bowl.

Now, you've got a bowl of apple filled purses, a cooking pan of some sort, hopefully a little bit of the left over apple mixture, and a small bowl of melted butter.

Dip each purse into the butter and toss it into the pan. Coat the entire purse with butter but allow the excess to drip off. It sounds weird but it's actually possible to have too much butter. The butter keeps each purse separate and allows the bread to be picked apart by monkeys. It also tends to run down to the bottom and kind of fry the bread in the bottom of the pan.

Drizzle the rest of the apple stuff over the top of pastry

Baking

This is where I'm still doing the most experimentation. The recipe originally called for 350F for 40 minutes or until the top was brown.

My oven has an upper element which tends to brown the top while the base is still raw. In my last experiment, I put the pan on the bottom rack, put a cookie sheet on the top rack to block the direct radiation and baked the bread for 70min or so in the indirect heat.

Here is the result. If you could smell it, you'd want to sleep with me. I have to be very careful about preparing this recipe when I have relatives or non-female friends over.

Substituting the dough in this recipe for puff-pastry would probably cause your oven to collapse into some sort of black hole of yumminess. I'm a bit scared someone might try it.