Southern Sympathies: Strawberry Bread

The inspiration for this recipe came from Perre Coleman Magness’ Southern Sympathy Cookbook and I was super excited for another reason to dive back into it! I like Magness’ book as it takes on the same attitude and feeling that I have over food, that while it’s made for a funeral it’s meant to be used to celebrate our life and living. I made two rounds of this recipe and I think if I did a round three I’d get it down perfect!

The first recipe I made was just a translation of the original recipe in which I switched out the eggs for egg replacer. The problem with that is while the egg replacer works well for recipes like denser muffins or brownies, it is not a good replacement for things like quick breads and cakes. When I pulled the bread out of the oven I had a dense, albeit delicious, bread pudding like dish. I went back to the internet to search for a recipe that looked legit. Luckily there were a few to choose from and I settled on this recipe from Liv B.

I've added a few extra notes that I think will give you better results!

Ingredients

• 1 cup non-dairy milk + 1 tbsp vinegar

• 1/2 cup cane sugar

• 1/3 cup canola or vegetable oil

• 2 tsp vanilla extract

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 tbsp baking powder

• 1/2 tsp baking soda

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 1 cup fresh strawberries, chopped and then lightly mashed with a fork

  • I would suggest adding about 3 tablespoons of sugar to your strawberries and letting them macerate for a several hours beforehand so that you can extract as much of the water from them as possible and have sweeter berries.

Instructions

1. Slice your berries and sprinkle with sugar. Toss and thoroughly coat the berries and let them macerate for several hours. When you’re ready to bake drain the liquid from the berries and reserve it to pour on top of the bread later if you would like!

2. Preheat oven to 350 F.

3. In a small bowl, combine non-dairy milk and vinegar. Stir to combine then set aside.

4. In a mixing bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

5. In a separate mixing bowl, combine the cane sugar, oil, vanilla extract and milk mixture. Stir to combine. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and stir to form a dough. Add in the strawberries and stir gently until just combined.

   1. Be careful to not overmix the dough as it will begin to overdevelop the gluten which will result in a denser bread.

   2. I read some recipes that suggest lightly coating the strawberries in flour to keep them from sinking to the bottom of the pan. I feel like this is a solid idea as I did not do this and my berries def sunk to the bottom which you can see in the cover photo.

6. Grease a loaf tin, I use a 5×9 standard size loaf pan. I always have about 10 packs of parchment paper in the kitchen and highly recommend using that as it makes clean up so much easier and helps get the bread out of the loaf pan with ease!

7. Bake in preheated oven for 42-45 minutes, until golden brown and a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean or with a crumb or two attached.

8. Allow to cool before removing from pan and slicing.