This past weekend my wife and I had to pick up some flour for a recipe that we were having. I think it was to thicken an alfredo sauce or something like that, but I honestly couldn't tell you now. Anyway, in the process of opening the flour, the bag ripped and there was no way we were going to be able to seal the bag tightly with a giant tear in it.
I put the flower in a resealable air-tight container, but then my wife said "why don't you make some coffee can bread?" It has been a while since I made it, so I had to dig way back in the cupboards to find my two trusty coffee cans.
You see, these coffee cans are very very special. They have special qualities that make them the perfect vessel for warm, yeasty, delicious bread. I've had these coffee cans ever since I moved out on my own and maybe a couple of times a year I pull them out and make the magic happen.
Most coffee cans these days are either plastic so you can't put them directly in the oven, or they have a lip around the top of the inside so that it would be impossible to slide the loaves out after they bake.
That is part of the reason I cherish these two simple coffee cans so much.
The recipe is fairly simple. It is in a cookbook that my mom hand typed for me when I moved out. Where she got the recipe from is beyond me. The book includes this recipe and countless others that grew to be my favorites in my time living with my parents.
It is actually rarer than you would think that I pull this cookbook out. I grew up in the country and thirty years ago we weren't as health conscious about what we put in our bodies as we are today. With many of the recipe's in the book requiring mass amounts of sugar, butter, or shortening, it is a good idea for me to use the cookbook sparingly.
If you can't tell from the opening picture, I did a riff on the bread this time and I added cinnamon and brown sugar along with a little butter to the inside of the bread. It will become more obvious in the coming photos, I promise.
Typically, when I make this bread I use the full 4.5 cups of flour and regular milk. The bread usually comes out very dense and heavy. This time I only used four cups of flour and I also made a change to the milk. My wife and I stopped buying dairy milk a long time ago and have fully switched to unsweetened vanilla almond milk. This was the first time I have made the bread using almond milk.
I also have a love/hate relationship with yeast. It just never seems to do what it is supposed to for me. I either use too cold water or too warm water and it is generally a chore for me to get the bread to proof and rise properly.
My yeast was actually a month past its due date and it wasn't bubbling the way I expected it to, but I moved forward with the recipe anyway.
I don't know if it was the almond milk, the reduced amount of flour, something with the yeast, or the fact that I kept the cans in the microwave with a steaming mug of water to help it rise, but this bread turned out so light and fluffy. It is probably the best batch of coffee can bread I have ever made in the twenty or so years I have been attempting it.
I didn't grease the coffee cans all the way to the top, so the one loaf stuck to the sides and the top tore off when I tried to shake it out. Once I cut everything into slices, you can't really tell the difference anyway. It made about twenty full slices and it is an out of body experience if you toast it and throw a little bit of butter on your slice when you eat it.
If you are lucky enough to have the proper equipment at home, I highly recommend you try this recipe. It is one of my childhood favorites.
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