Kitchen Adventures: Squash Bread

This recipe has been haunting me. I nearly talked myself out of making it because it lacked a lot of critical details, and was completely foreign to me. And yet, I found myself flipping back to that page trying to suss out the author’s meaning.

The recipe comes from Das Essen Unsrer Leute (The Food of our People, I think), a cookbook of folk recipes collected from the Volga-German communities Ellis County, Kansas. (For anyone traveling through Kansas on I-70, you probably saw the majestic spires of The Cathedral of the Plains in Victoria.) Since the towns were founded in 1876 until well into the 20th century, this society remained close-knit and largely intact, and did little to integrate with the American culture. So the recipes in this book are very traditional, and can be traced back to each family’s pre-Russian settlements in Germany. My squash recipe was contributed from the small town of Liebenthal in nearby Rush County, population less than 100.



The idea of a “squash bread” messed with my head a bit, until I remembered that one of my favorite recipes is a pumpkin bread (squash), and that making loaf after loaf of zucchini bread was one way to solve the answer to an over-abundant zucchini harvest in the home garden. But - here’s kicker #1 - this recipe isn’t a quick bread like my pumpkin and zucchini recipes; it’s a leavened bread.

Kicker #2: It calls for 2 cups stewed squash pressed through a potato ricer. So the next question became, how does one stew squash? I couldn’t find any other example of a squash bread recipe (other than pumpkin and zucchini), and the only recipes for stewed squash called for making a stew with squash and onions. I may not know much, but I know that isn’t what is meant for the bread.



I bought a butternut squash at the local farmer’s market, peeled it, and sliced it into 1" chunks. Then I cooked it in a skillet with a little bit of water. My end goal was to make a product similar to canned pumpkin.







After letting it cool, I riced it. As it turned out, a medium-sized squash only riced to about 1 1/2 cups, so I had to integrate in some of the bits that resisted ricing in order to make up the difference in volume. Hmmm...



This was added to scalded milk, a bit of sugar and butter. Once that mixture cooled, I added in the equivalent of 1 cake of yeast, then started adding flour to a quantity only specified as “flour enough to knead.” I lost count on how many cups that turned out to be, but I can tell you I made a major dent in the 10# bag I’d recently bought.



After kneading it for a good 15 minutes, I turned it into my favorite large thrown clay bowl, something I purchased years ago from the Historic General Store in Plevna, Kansas. (That store was an old-fashioned false-front building with wide wood plank floors littered with peanut shells. The store burned down in 1997.) It was a huge amount of dough, and it turned out to be something of a monster in the rise.



After punching it down and dividing, it made three large loaves. Baking instructions were absent, so I relied on my Victory cookbook for those details, and cooked them at 425° until the crust was a golden brown, and the loaves sounded hollow when tapped.



These are—without a doubt—the fluffiest most tender and tasty loaves of bread I have ever baked. Hands down.



That night I served the bread sliced with a bit of butter and local honey, alongside black beans and rice made from my grandmother’s recipe. Heaven!