One thing to keep in mind when making very moist, butter-rich doughs is they will be sticky. With a few tweaks, including cutting down on the yeast (older recipes often call for excessive quantities by today’s standards), Corbitt’s version was a keeper. I figured that matrons of 1960s home cooking would be a good place to start, and it turned out the best version I found was by Helen Corbitt, the Julia Child-esque cooking celebrity with a Texas twang and a penchant for Neiman Marcus (she was the department store’s restaurant chef). Today, there are so many versions I found it difficult to settle on one basic recipe. Whether the bread evolved from multiple influences or was truly “invented,” variations began appearing in the Los Angeles Times as early as 1946. (King opened a bakery specializing in monkey bread shortly after she returned to Texas.) The women reportedly named the bread after the neighborhood children, little meddling “monkeys” who couldn’t keep their fingers out of the steaming fresh-from-the-oven bread. Others maintain it was the creation of silent film actress ZaSu Pitts and her neighbor, Ann King, a Texas housewife who moved to Burbank during the 1940s after her husband landed a job at Lockheed Martin. Some culinary historians speculate that monkey bread evolved from Parker House rolls, the late 19th century crescent-style rolls nestled side by side in a sheet pan (when baked in a ring mold or Bundt pan, the bread was said to resemble the prickly Chilean monkey puzzle tree). How about a caramelized brown sugar-walnut version for a lazy autumn brunch? Or an olive oil-thyme version to go with whatever is on the grill? Once you get those basics down, monkey bread is relatively easy to morph into special-occasion-worthy variations. How long you knead the dough, what size to cut the pieces prior to baking, the type of pan you use - they are all important. It turns out the trick with this buttery yeast bread is to pay close attention to the technique. But the good news is that once I had the basic monkey bread recipe down, I found it could stand up to all sorts of variations - and was easy enough to make that I could work it into last-minute weekday dinners. In the end, I had to pass on my grandmother’s recipe it turns out that too much butter causes a saggy middle (go figure) and if you pile up the dough in a loaf pan the way she suggests, the bread tends to collapse after baking. It still took a couple of nights of persistent tweakings and several trips to my cookbook library and even more to the oven to get a monkey bread recipe that worked as well as I wanted. If only recipes with PBS-worthy histories always worked better after all that passing down and messing around. The card’s wear and tear came from all the previous generations tweaking the bread with a little more butter this time, baking it in a loaf pan the next, or adding more yeast. In fact, until recently the card probably hadn’t ever left the box. It’s not because the Eisenhower-era pull-apart bread glistening with butter is a weeknight staple at my house. Of all the heirloom family recipes tucked away in my converted shoe box (iPhone apps have nothing on 3-by-5 cards), one for monkey bread ranks second only to my great-grandmother’s biscuits as the most tattered.
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