Celery bread

Author Notes

We got the idea to make a bread that was a riff on “ants on a log.” You know, celery stalks filled in with peanut butter and trails of raisins. And spreading peanut butter on a slice of this bread is a good idea, but the peanut butter can overpower the celery. Well, I’m not trying to trick any kids into eating a vegetable.
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There are several variations of celery in this bread. Still, celery is the star of this bread, and you can see a few green flecks in the slices and the crust. I like to think that if celery were JLo, then the cream of celery soup and roasted celery root would be the back-up dancers. You with me? The soup and the root are still bringing in flavors of celery, but in slightly different ways. The soup is creamy and more complex from being simmered with potato, onions, and garlic. The roasted root adds texture and a more mellow version of celery. This makes the whole bread better in flavor, and tastes more like a celery bread than a few stalks of celery could alone.
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I used Mark Bittman's basic speedy no-knead bread recipe as a guide but made some changes to fix a bread that didn't work too well on the first go because of all the additions. The extra 5/8 cup of water was cut out to make way for a 1/2 cup of the cream of celery soup, which helped the dough from being too wet. Instead of roasting the celery for the final recipe, we kept it raw because we like the clean, fresh taste of celery and wanted to get close to keeping some of that in the bread. The cream of celery soup used here was slightly adapted from Bon Appetit via epicurious. The soup leftovers turned out to be a soulmate-level match for a thick slice of this bread. (Please follow this link for soup instructions: http://alittlesaffron.com/2012/03/13/cream-of-celery-soup/ )
—Ileana Morales Valentine