Peach Skins May Be The Unusual Ingredient Your Homemade Bread Needs

Baking homemade bread is a rewarding experience that fills your house with the sweet, savory scent of a local bakery. It's an easier task than some folks think. As long as you avoid common mistakes while using a bread machine that can ruin your creation, you even have technology to help you out these days. However, the ordeal can become stale after you've used the same ingredients over and over again. The question is: how can you put some zing into your loaves to make the endeavor as exciting as the first time?

To find out, we asked a professional. As the owner and operator of two Pizaro's Pizza Napoletana locations in Houston, Nicole Bean is a pizza and bread making expert who works with dough for a living. She was kind enough to share some of her knowledge about how to level up a handcrafted loaf. One of the first things she suggested was obvious. "Various fruits can be fun to add variety and texture to dough along with changing the flavor profile, sometimes drastically," she said.

It's commonplace for some homemade loaves to contain fruit, like banana bread. However, sometimes you don't want chunks of produce as a textural addition; instead, you just want the flavor enhanced. Pressed for an illustration of this, Bean went a bit further. According to her, "using peach skins saturated in your water a few days prior to making dough can help in natural yeast production as well enhance flavor by adding a sweetness to your bread."

Similar to how you can infuse tequila with fruit to influence the taste, bread can be upgraded by instilling the essence of fruit — like peach skins — into the water for the dough. In other words, using peaches as a sweet flavor additive instead of a textural addition is like using salty bacon fat to season a savory dish. However, not everyone is a fan of the fruit. Bean isn't just using those syrupy summer fruits to change the taste of her bread, but has also reached for dairy products. "I've recently played with yogurt in an unconventional pizza recipe and found that it provided a yeast-y smell but did not affect flavor much," she noted.

If you simply want to season your bread without affecting the texture, there is no shortage of additives to investigate. Summer bread infused with fruity flavors of all varieties are potential game-changers, while fall-inspired aromas of pumpkin spice, apples, and cinnamon would be a welcome addition to any harvest season feast. Think even further outside the box with ingredients like kiwis, avocados, and mangos — set your imagination loose! "People are getting really wild with ingredients," says Bean. "Sky's the limit!"