PLAT DU JOUR : Dried Date & Prune Tea Loaf

Dried Date & Prune Tea Loaf – A Test Recipe.

Most people seem to have some food items or dishes that immediately evoke an emotional response or call up strong memories of certain people, events or settings. Traditional Date tea loaf immediately reminds me of both my grannies. They were both very fond of this and both baked it regularly with one Gran’s recipe (which I still use frequently) being way better that the other’s.

 

However, both versions were often quite dense and frequently surprisingly dry, requiring hefty slathers of butter or margarine on each slice to go down smoothly. Both my grannies used dried, pitted dates intended for baking and both refused to use the rectangular, shredded and compressed blocks of dried dates frequently found in the baking section of well stocked grocery stores. Both grannies claimed the compressed, blocked stuff tasted like cardboard.

 

I have a serious liking for the almost cloyingly sweet, thoroughly exotic and very nearly dark taste and flavour of the plain old dried & pitted dates used for baking. (Dried Medjool dates are lovely too, but they’re bastards to bake with as the pip refuses obstinately to separate cleanly from the sticky, shrunken fruit pulp surrounding them.) However, I’ve always thought the dried date taste and flavour of the traditional date tea loaf was a wee bit too much in being so rich and overbearing as to put me off after one and half or maybe two slices.

 

So, here’s a first attempt at baking a moist, less stodgy and ‘lighter’ version with a somewhat less intense date flavour, but still with a full, fruity taste. At this point increasing the ratio of fat to flour, reducing the level of sugar, boosting the baking powder with a dash of bicarbonate and ‘diluting’ my regular quantity of dried dates with 25% dried, pitted prunes seem to check all the boxes. It’s not bad for a first modification, but I think it can still improve a little further.

© RS Young, 2021

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