How to Bake Monkey Bread

A ridicu­lous amount of time has been spent bak­ing this week. Breads with and with­out yeast (with is supe­rior, appar­ently), plain breads, fla­vored breads, sweet breads. I’ve stum­bled upon a great crispy olive-oily bread twice now, and I can’t repli­cate it. Bolivian ovens are just plain bonkers. The tem­per­a­ture never reg­u­lates, the heat­ing is irreg­u­lar, and quite frankly I can’t even fig­ure out if the listed num­bers are in Fahrenheit or Celsius. I’m guess­ing Celsius. Not that it really mat­ters, of course, since it LIES. Add to that the fact that I live in a val­ley bowl sur­rounded by moun­tains 8500 feet above sea level. The rainy sea­son has just begun, which means that this time last month it was 0% humid­ity and right now it’s 0.0273% humid­ity. I prob­a­bly didn’t pick the best spot in the world to try to fig­ure out how to bake breads. I’ll return to the States — and sub­se­quently a loca­tion with more water and more oxy­gen — bake a bread, and find that it’s exploded all over my kitchen.

Right, so, yes­ter­day I went with a Monkey Bread. Sweet, gooey, etc. The mon­key bread turned out rea­son­ably in that the fla­vor was there but, going right back to the tem­per­a­ture issue, the mid­dle was too doughy. Still, the sug­ary doughy results were suf­fi­cient to send the house­hold into a carbohydrate-induced foggy haze.

I’ve had to alter the water mea­sure­ments sig­nif­i­cantly… about dou­ble that of all of the recipes I’ve found online. I don’t know if this is due to the flour avail­able here, the lack of humid­ity, the alti­tude, or a com­bi­na­tion thereof. I just mix the lot until it looks how it’s sup­posed to look.

This may have some­thing to do with my exceed­ingly irreg­u­lar results.

Ingredients:
(note: this was to feed 7 peo­ple plus pos­si­bly a few tea-guests.)

Dough:
7 cups Flour
2 Tbsp Yeast
1 Tbsp Salt
6.5 cups Water

Cinnamon Sugar:
5 cups Sugar
4 Tbsp Cinnamon

Glazey Stuff:
1 cup Butter
Arbitrary amount of Honey

Tools:
Monster-Sized Baking Dish to hold it all (greased)
Small bak­ing dish
1 big mix­ing bowl
1 medium mix­ing bowl

I mixed the dry dough ingre­di­ents — flour, yeast, and salt — together in the big mix­ing bowl. and, um, I do mean big. Thanksgiving Turkey Big. Texas Big.

I then mixed in the water 1 cup at a time until the dough was suf­fi­ciently fluid. Very sticky and gooey. Mine is much clumpier than the recipes I’ve found for this dough mix tend to indi­cate online. It’d be smoother if I were using a mixer, but that would involve track­ing down a trans­former to ensure I don’t burn out my mother’s American cur­rent KitchenAid.

The dough was then left to rise for an hour. I cov­ered it with a well-floured cloth (hand­ful of flour on the cloth, rubbed the flour in, lightly shook off the flour) dur­ing that time.

After an hour, the dough had risen sig­nif­i­cantly. Bubbles were evi­dent on top. Incidentally, this dough works as any gen­eral extra-yeasty bread dough. I’ve added more flour to make it bake like a nor­mal bread, kept it flat and baked it in olive oil for a crispy rich bread, etc.

Meanwhile, the sugar and cin­na­mon were mixed in the medium sized bowl. Very cin­na­mon heavy. The monster-sized (still think­ing Texas Big) bak­ing dish was thor­oughly greased with short­en­ing and then floured.

I took fist-sized dol­lops of the dough and rolled/tossed/shook it in the cin­na­sugar mix until thor­oughly coated. Those dol­lops were laid out com­fort­ably in the bak­ing dish until the dish bot­tom was cov­ered. Poured but­ter and driz­zled honey on top. I then lay­ered more dol­lops on top, added but­ter and honey. I kept lay­er­ing until I ran out of fea­si­ble space in the dish. Extra but­ter and honey on top with the remain­ing cinnasugar.

The mon­key bread went on the top rack in the oven. Again, I live in crazy-high Cochabamba, Bolivia, South America, so I filled a small bak­ing dish with water and put it on the bot­tom rack. That helps keep the oven humid. Or it would, were the air not so dry that it sucks every bit of mois­ture out of every­thing. Y’know.

Baked it for 30–45 minutes-ish at I-Haven’t-the-Foggiest tem­per­a­ture. It just looked right. With the uneven­ness of our oven, I should have turned it at least halfway through the process.

and, of course, the fin­ished Monkey Bread of sug­ary foggy brains.