“This is a sensationally good and oddly textured sweet bread or coffee cake.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread
The last time I made Monkey Bread was in seventh grade Family Consumer Science class (aka “home ec”). We used refrigerated biscuits that we cut into quarters, arranged in a Bundt pan, and then dumped a homemade caramel sauce over the whole thing.
The Beard version of Monkey Bread requires you to actually make the bread dough yourself, but other than that the technique is the same.
Here are the ingredients:
I skipped the currants the recipe calls for, due to my deep-seated hatred of them as miniature versions of raisins. Also, I think the idea of caramel with raisins is disgusting purely on principle.
Monkey Bread starts as a fairly basic, albeit rich, white bread dough. After the first rising (an hour and a half), I pulled off little chunks of dough, rolled them in melted butter and brown sugar, and then arranged them in a Bundt pan. Mike graciously agreed to help, and we created a little Monkey Bread assembly line.
After letting the dough rise again (for only half an hour, since I was getting hungry), I baked the bread at 375 degrees for 40 minutes. The caramel sauce did overflow from the Bundt pan, creating a small mess in my non-self cleaning oven (Mike was nice enough to clean that up, too. He is really the best husband a bread baker could ask for).
The finished product looked quite lovely, if I may say so myself:
Beard’s Monkey Bread recipe was quite good (the only way for something with two sticks of butter and 1 1/2 cups of sugar to not be good is to add raisins to it). But as I pulled of little chunks of bread, I felt somewhat nostalgic for my Family Consumer Science Monkey Bread. Yes, the bread itself was obviously better than refrigerated biscuits. But one thing that recipe had going for it? Lots and lots of caramel. Beard’s recipe has a mere glazing. Now, if only I still had that class hand out…
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