My mother in law remembers in the Troy NY area having a bread from Dufort bakery in the 50s.
It was sweet a white bread baked in a can but there was no molasses in it (that seems to be the favorite way to make similar breads).
My daughter is getting into baking bread and looking for a recipe. The bakery is long closed, but there is a Facebook page run by family, but alas the descendants have lost that recipe.
Google-fu has failed so I turn here.
Can anybody help my daughter become her grandmother’s hero?
I don’t know about “baked in a can,” but challah is a sweet white bread that is baked for Shabbat. I have a good recipe, and it doesn’t have mollasses in it-- it does have honey and both white and brown sugar, but you can just use more white sugar instead of the brown sugar. I also put in a little bit of barley malt to help the crust, but since you probably don’t have this in the house, leave it out; since you are baking it in a can (I’m not even really sure what this means), I’m assuming the crust isn’t the same consideration as for a loaf baked even without a pan, like challah.
Also, challah is an egg bread, but you can try substituting water for the eggs, if you don’t like egg breads, or have a reason to believe the recipe you are looking for was not an egg bread.
If you want to try it, let me know.
Hmmm. I just tried Googling “Dufort’s, NY bread recipes,” and got tons of hits. I don’t have time to sift through them looking for the truly authentic ones, and the “sweet, white” ones, but this may be available out there. It looks like there are sites run by people who actually worked at Dufort’s, and I got that after about 90 seconds of browsing.
We tried that - most are molasses based recipes and removing that cuts down on the relevant hits dramatically.
What you’re describing almost sounds like an Italian panettone.
~VOW