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In 1990, Concord Records put together a collection of recipes provided by jazz artists, writers and other folks associated with the music. The project came up when I was in the thick of my bread-making phase. There were weeks when I experimented with two or three new kinds of bread. The variety that got the biggest response around the house was popular enough that it received a name. The name is explained below. Here is the recipe.
1 package yeast
1/8 tsp ginger
1 cup bread flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup wheat germ
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp molasses
1 12-oz can evaporated milk
2 Tbsp salad oil
1 cup cracked wheat
1 cup boiling water
Handful of sesame seeds
Handful of poppy seeds
Handful of sunflower seeds
Begin by covering the cracked wheat with the boiling water. Set it aside to cool; stirring it a bit will speed the cooling process. Mix the rest of the ingredients in the order listed. Add the cooled wheat, then the seeds. A handful of seeds is enough to fill the cupped palm of an average-sized hand. Do not use Dexter Gordon’s hand, or for that matter, Ruby Braff’s.
Knead the dough after mixing and let it rise twice, punching it down vigorously. Or make it easy on yourself and use an automatic bread machine. If you bake conventionally, use a standard bread pan and bake the loaf in a preheated oven at 375 degrees for 40 minutes. The automatic bread machine I used is the DAK Auto Bakery, a dandy. I hope it’s still available. Since this is a hefty bread, you may want to try a slightly longer baking time, depending on the accuracy of your oven’s thermostat.
When I was doing the experiments that resulted in this recipe, I was listening to Duke Ellington’s suite The River, hence the name of the bread.
To whet your appetite for the suite, if not for the bread, here is the movement titled, “The River Spring,†played by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Jarvi.
The full suite is half of this album.