Kūlia cooks!: Hawaiian style Mango bread

Everytime I make mango bread, it always brought back some fond memories of my college days at Chaminade in Honolulu. I can still see that big mango tree behind the Chapel and how the "girls" would sneak mango off the trees and sweet smell of mango bread from our community kitchen... (Use your imagination what we did :P)

There were a big mango sales at Whole Foods. Good mango was hard to come by last year, I was excited to see something that resembled good produce. I bought a case. I picked one that was not quite ready since I was supposed to be cooking for a women retreat next week.

Mango bar was one of the dessert I need to make the filling this week. I had more than enough mango since they all ripened at the same time.

My hanai sister Kawailani was looking for my mango bread recipe. She thought it was posted here. Well, I forgot. With all these extra mangoes, making some bread would be a great idea. The only issue with my recipe it was very moist and the bread didn't freeze very well. I remember how mushy it got when we packed it for our cross country drive to CA. I did some research. I found a recipe by Sam Choy, my favorite local chef of all time. I did a little of modifying and here it is. It's still very moist. I finely chopped 1/2 the mango into small piece to make the bread more mangoie, while the other 1/2 were in big pieces to show off the fruit. I also changed the cake flour in the original recipe to regular flour, just to give the bread a firmer texture.

Hawaiian Mango Bread

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking soda

1/2 salt

1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup melted butter

3 eggs

2 tsp vanilla

2 1/4 cups diced mango - 1 cup finely chopped, the rest in bigger chunks.

Directions:

Heat oven to 350*F degrees. Grease or spray 2 9x5 loaf pans or 1 13X11 oblong pan with non stick baking spray or butter

In a small box, mix all the dry ingredients together: Flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and sugar

In a large box, whisk together vegetable oil and eggs.

Whisk in melted butter

Add vanilla

Fold in the dry mixture.

Fold in mango, mix well

Pour batter in the 2 prepared loaf pans or the oblong pan. Take it stand for about 10 mins.

Bake for 1 hour, ready when toothpick insert in the center comes out clean or when you pressed the center, the bread spring back

Remove from oven and cool for about 10 min. Invert the pan and ready to enjoy.

You can wrap up the extra loaf and freeze it.

Serve with whipped butter.

If you bake this for brunch in a oblong pan, sprinkle with powder sugar before serving.

2 loaves or 12 generous serving.

PS: How I cut mango... I gave Mr Wonderful 2 mangoes last week, he called to find out how he is supposed to cut it. Here is my quickie way of cutting mango:

Slice the mango along the seed into 3 pieces: you will have the 2 "cheeks" and the seed

Score the meat to the skin, but not cutting through