They don’t know it yet, but King Arthur Baking and Caledonia Spirits had a collaboration. If you’re not familiar with the name, Caledonia Spirits is known for its Barr Hill Gin and the honey they use to make it. No, no. Don’t stop reading now, this is not about the gin, this is about the juniper berries used to make the gin and how they came to be in a loaf of bread.
Ok, well if you’re going to split hairs, technically it wasn’t a collaboration at all, it was just me using those juniper berries, and the recipes from King Arthur that allowed me to do so. Let me explain.
A few weeks ago, I went on a tour of the Barr Hill Distillery up in Montpelier, Vermont. One of the first things they show you is a 55 gallon barrel of honey, where they offer you a spoon and say dig in. “If you want a second taste, just grab a clean spoon.” They have a collection of bees that roam the Northeast Kingdom of Caledonia and the honey that is produced is an important ingredient in their Barr Hill Gin.
Rodger, our tour guide, continued to lead us through the factory showing us the different stills used to make their different spirits and talked about how the stills are named after different employee grandmothers. Pretty soon we came to the 5 gallon bucket of juniper berries.
Now, if you’re not familiar with juniper, it is a shrub that grows in the northern latitudes of Europe, Asia and North America. It produces small fleshy cones, that we recognize as berries, because of the shape, color and size. These tiny blueberry-looking fruits create the flavor of citrus and pine in gin and whatever else they are added to.
Rodger opened the bucket, and told us these are the Croatian juniper berries they use to make the gin.
“Croatia? Why do you get juniper berries from Croatia?”
Apparently Croatia is the leading exporter of juniper berries. And when you need them in vast quantities, such as Barr Hill does, that’s where they come from.
Rodger invited us to smell and taste the berries. They had already been crushed to release the aroma. If you’ve never tasted juniper berries, they are quite strong. “Pungent” is a common word used to describe them. A little goes a long way, but for someone who likes strong flavors, this was an intriguing scent. It gave me an idea.
“Hey Rodger, what are the chances I could get some of these to take home and bake into a bread?”
“Oh sure, that won’t be a problem. Remind me at the end of the tour.” And that’s how I left my Bar Hill Distillery tour with a soup container’s worth of crushed Croatian juniper berries.
Then I had to decide what to do with them.
I thought about the 55 gallon barrel of honey. If the honey was a good flavor to add to the gin, then it’s probably a good one to include in some bread. There were two recipes on King Arthur’s website that I’ve used that I remembered being honey friendly. One was their Vermont Whole Wheat Honey Oatmeal Bread, which I had made a few times. I decided to start with this one and reduced the recipe to fit my small loaf pan and took a guess on the quantity of juniper berries.
10g seemed like a good number.
Well, it was a little stronger than anticipated, but at least I had a starting point. I made another batch of the same reduced size loaf and this time added only 5g of juniper berries. That was much better, but because the flavor was so strong from so few berries, there wasn’t actually a lot of distribution of berries throughout the bread. That’s when I remembered King Arthur Baking’s Walnut Bread. This recipe called for a significant amount of honey and I thought that the walnuts would accompany the juniper berries nicely.
I reduced that recipe as well and added 7g of juniper berries since it was bigger than the loaf bread. Here is the recipe reduced to 18% of its original size and here is how I made it happen.
ingredients
61.2g warm water
2g yeast
7g juniper berries
30.6g honey
9g walnut oil
1.62g salt
129.6g all-purpose flour
40.8g walnuts
directions
Dissolve the yeast in the water and add the berries.
Let sit for a few minutes to get the yeast going, then add the honey, oil and salt.
Add the flour, then knead into a smooth, satiny ball.
Let rise in a greased container until puffy. I set mine outside in the sun, so it took about an hour.
Gently deflate the dough and knead in the walnuts.
Place on a pan covered with parchment, cover and let rise until puffy. This took about 45 minutes for my small loaf.
Preheat oven to 350oF
Sprinkle loaf with flour and then cut a 1” deep cross on the top
Bake for about 35 minutes, until well browned.
Let cool for at least a half hour before cutting
You’ll see both loaves from both recipes pictured here. I had a couple people do taste tests for me, and everyone agreed that the Walnut Bread with juniper berries was the better loaf. The flavor of the juniper was present, without being overpowering and the crunchiness of the walnuts actually paired really well with the flavor. The honey in the loaf helped tame the pungent berries and made for an overall really nice loaf of bread, especially with some goat cheese smeared across the surface.
In fact, it was so good that I think I’m going to scale up and make a full size batch. Maybe then it will count as a collaboration? Nah. We’ll just keep it in this small Vermont kitchen.
Hey, if you really want to try the reduced Vermont Whole Wheat Honey Oatmeal Bread, just leave me a comment and I’ll send you my math.