The novelty of this recipe is that the bread is baked in coffee cans. For me, cooking in a can conjures images of a haggard guy riding the rails, carrying all his worldly possessions in a red bandana tied to the end of a long stick. Maybe at night he plays a harmonica while sitting around a campfire. Cooking out of a coffee can does not readily bring to mind images of comfort, table settings with cloth napkins, or telling the children to wash up before a Betty Crocker dinner.
Perhaps the clue for the why of this method can be found in the section heading. Gifts From Your Kitchen. Picture it: The holiday season rolls around and there just aren’t enough bread pans to efficiently bake for all the people on your gift list. This lingers in the back of your mind, festering like fetid meat. Sometime in late January, just as that can of Maxwell House is going into the garbage, an idea is sparked by caffeine and necessity! Save all these cans and come Christmas, boom, bread pans. Think of all the money saved from not having to buy more pans! The efficiency, the splendor, the joy! And so it began. UPDATE: I looked up the real reason. It seems to have started during the Great Depression. Since cans took up less horizontal space in the oven than a loaf pan, more loaves could be made at once, thus saving fuel.
It’s the year 2020 and I don’t remember the last time I saw a coffee can. Granted, I don’t drink much coffee, and when I do, I tend to buy a small bag of whole beans. And by a small bag of whole beans, I mean I go to Starbucks and buy a decaf latte. In my mind, I buy a bag and make coffee every morning, drinking it while sitting on the porch wrapped in a warm poncho, watching the sky turn from milky white to vibrant blue. Starbucks in the car is pretty good, too, though. My mom and dad drink coffee so my first thought was to hit them up for some cans. Then I remembered mom buys the supersized plastic containers of coffee. I sometimes have her save these for me because they make excellent compost containers for keeping by the sink. I asked on Facebook if coffee even still came in cans. Several people told me yes, and one of my friends actually buys a brand (Café Bustelo) which does. She’s an artist, so she repurposes the cans for paints and brushes and such. She told me she had a couple clean ones I could have. We planned a porch exchange because we couldn’t actually visit because of the spike in the number of Covid cases.
I’ve mentioned I watch cooking shows a lot now. The Great British Baking Show is one of my favorites. One of the contestants this year listens to his cakes. He says he learned that technique from a contestant on an earlier season. When you hear the cake bubbling away, it’s not yet done. Apparently, it’s the steam from the liquid ingredients being cooked out. If the cake is quiet, it’s likely overdone. The sweet spot is a soft sizzle. This bread recipe says 40 minutes in the oven or until golden brown. Before I could even get to the sonic part of baking, I smelled something foul. It was not exactly the smell of food being overcooked and burnt, but something was not right. It couldn’t possibly be the bread, I thought. Only ten minutes had elapsed. Turns out it was the smell of the cans heating up in a gas oven. I wondered if this was actually toxic and I didn’t get the memo. A lot has changed since the seventies, and until the nineties, I was a kid and didn’t pay a lot of attention to details such as if cooking in a can might be safe or not. The internet assured me it’s fine and the smell did dissipate, so onward and upward little bread loaves! At the forty minute mark, I could see the top and it looked golden. I listened to it, because that’s what the guy on the show did, and I heard bubbling. When the contestant first listened to his cake, I wondered if to a layperson such as myself it would be obvious. It was obvious, but I didn’t trust my newly acquired knowledge! That was a cake. This was bread. I should have trusted. The bread was dense. I could even see some doughiness around the edges once it was cut. Let me back up and talk about getting it out of the can, though. The modern cans I used were made with an inner lip near the top. I suspect cans of yesteryear did not have this. The bottom of the second can had to be opened with a can opener. Otherwise, the fate of the second loaf would have been the same as the first loaf, which was for the most part a squashed crumbly mess. The show loaf, as I’ll call it, maintained some of the telltale ridges of the coffee can. The taste of pepper was there even though the recipe only calls for ¼ tspn. There was a little tang from the sour cream, and with butter, it wasn’t too bad in taste. (I did stick all of the bread back into the oven wrapped in foil for a few more minutes and it helped somewhat.)
I wish this had been more successful. I wish it had been a showstopper. I wanted to give all of my friends and neighbors this Gift From My Kitchen for the holidays.
I think this recipe would be worth another shot, but in a bread pan. I’m not a convert to the coffee can method, and unlike the cooks of decades past, I don’t have a surplus of coffee cans, anyway. Really, I just have the one remaining can my friend gave me, and I don’t think Starbucks cups will hold up as well in the oven.
Rating: 3 Red Spoons
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