Juice Pulp Quick Bread

I’m a big fan of recipes that ‘recycle’/’repurpose’ leftover ingredients into something entirely new.

Waste not want not, and all that jazz.

Sourdough starter is the most obvious and popular of this trend. Feeding a starter to make a loaf of bread will usually result in leftover starter, but I almost never throw my excess starter away. I can’t help it, it’s like a baby and you don’t throw out teh baby with the bathwater.

You just find other interesting and yummy ways to re-use it. (See here, here, here and here.)

Breakfast stratas are another great vehicle for recipe recycling.

A loaf of stale bread or even a batch of old biscuits or scones can form the base of a endless variety of new and delicious breakfast dishes like this, this or this that nobody would be able to tell came from a recycled ingredient.

A few months ago I had family visiting and decided to make a mixed drink that featured some of my favorite ingredients; fresh ginger and fresh pineapple. It required me to both blend and strain a mixture of the two. The drink itself was utterly delicious, but it also left me with a considerable amount of pineapple ginger ‘pulp’.

Some people might have, understandably, looked at that pulp and decided to chuck it in the waste bin.

I mean, what else can you do with juice pulp?

But I didn’t throw it away. I was just really pleased with how the flavors of pineapple and ginger blended together in teh drink itself, and I saw the pulp as a concentration of all that flavor that shouldn’t go to waste without at least trying to recycle it into another recipe.

And as it turns out, the answer to the question of what else can you do with juice pulp is…well, lots of things.

Whether we’re talking about fruit or vegetables, the pulp left behind from most juices is full of healthy fiber. So if you’re looking for a healthy way to incorporate more of it into your diet, you can easily add the leftover pulp into smoothies, yogurt, soup broth, dips, or sauces. You can even use it as a binder for veggies patties.

Because juice pulp is naturally moist, it also lends itself well to baked goods that really depend upon added moisture to turn out right, like muffins or bread, which is what we’re doing here today.

Quick Bread gets its name from the fact that it doesn’t depend upon yeast to give it leavening and rise, which tends to make the process last a few hours from start to finish. Instead, it uses baking powder and baking soda to give it a ‘quick’ leavening//rise so that you can usually throw it together in about one hour, tops. Quick bread is also what I like to call/think of as a Blank Canvas Recipe, meaning that it can be personalized and experimented with for just about any palate or any flavor. I’ve made plenty of Quick Breads before on the blog that attest to that, and today’s recipe is one of them. I added the leftover ginger-pineapple pulp that I had from my mixed drinks to a basic quick bread batter and the results were truly fantasic.

The pulp itself ensured that the loaf stayed moist and tender, while the ginger-pineapple lent itself soooo well to the bread’s actual flavor. It smelled amazing in the oven, and tasted even better. I ate it slightly toasted and smeared with a pat of butter for breakfast alongside my coffee.

Also note: this recipe is adaptable for ANY juice pulp you want to use. It does lean on the sweeter side, so if you’d prefer it to be savory, you can always cut back on the amount of sugar.

Enjoy!

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