Recipe: Pumpkin Bread
Feb. 12th, 2014 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
loaded_marchOn Monday, for reasons of the pup, I had a very large can of pureed pumpkin (the sort used to make pies) cracked open and in a Tupperware container. The pup, however, turned up his nose at his food bowl when I mixed a couple of tablespoons into his dry food, giving me the sort of dirty look that can only be described as scandalized.
"Very funny," I told the pup as I scraped the food into the composter, rinsed out the bowl, and gave him his dry food with a teaspoon of molasses instead. "I could've sworn that you loved pumpkin. Or is it just that you like the pumpkin I cut in half, roast, and mash up? Even though the canned stuff is practically the same thing?"
At right about that point, the Spouse comes into the kitchen and said, "Oh, good, that means you can make pumpkin pie with the rest."
I gave him a long look. "We don't have any frozen pie shells. Also, I have the plague. What makes you think I'm in any kind of mood to make the dough, roll it out, put it in a pie pan, and make pumpkin pie? Even then, I'm missing a couple of ingredients, and I'm not making it tonight, because I'm hungry and it feels like I'm breathing through a freaking bowling ball right now."
Long story short, while I was making dinner (I no longer have any recollection of what I made that night), I also somehow ended up making my lunch for the next day. When that was done, miraculously, all the ingredients I needed to make pumpkin bread appeared on the counter. I have no idea how -- I can't blame the Spouse, because he has no idea what goes in pumpkin bread other than pumpkin.
So. Pumpkin bread.
I reiterate that I had a lot of canned pumpkin, because I only used a couple of tablespoons of it, and also had no recipe to follow, so I... got creative. I also ended up making three loaves of pumpkin bread (see: "a lot of canned pumpkin") and remembered an old cooking lesson that I apparently forgot in this instance -- make sure your bowl is large enough to contain everything, or you're going to make one heck of a mess when you're mixing.
ANYWAY.
If you only want to make one loaf of pumpkin bread, make sure to divide the ingredients below by three (and round up if necessary. Since I made it up on the spot, I figure it's a pretty forgiving recipe).
Starting off without a recipe also means that I used an old standby trick that I learned more out of observation than anything else, but the ratio of mashed fruitstuff to sugar and bread is roughly 1:1:1.
Dump your canned pumpkin in a bowl. I had almost 19 oz (about 3 cups).
Add three cups of white sugar.
Add four eggs.
Add 1/3 cups water and 1/3 cups applesauce (or 2/3 to 1 cup oil).
Mix it all up.
Technically, you're supposed to beat the eggs and fold it into the sugar, then add the oil (but I do the water and applesauce because I hate using that much oil), and then mix in the pumpkin, but, fuck that, I had the plague, and if I want to mix everything together in one go, I'm mixing everything together in one go.
Add 1 TBSP baking soda.
Add 1 TBSP cinnamon, 1 TBSP cloves, 1 TBSP ginger. Technically, it should be 3 tsp of each, but I had the plague and didn't want to measure out to that level of precision. You can also add nutmeg. I normally would have, except I couldn't find any, and, you know, plague. I wasn't going to go rooting around for it.
Mix it all up.
Add 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all purpose flour. Start with 3 cups, work your way up to 3.5 cups -- but only if the consistency of the batter doesn't look sufficiently sticky to you. Don't worry too much about this step. If you added 3 cups, you added three cups. If you added three and a half, you added three and a half. It's all good.
Mix it all up.
(If your bowl is too small, like mine was, try not to be too enthusiastic while you're doing the mixing. just a tip)
Split the batter up between three prepared (sprayed with PAM or greased with butter) 7 x 11 bread pans and put them in an oven pre-warmed to 350F.
Now this is the reason why it doesn't matter how much flour you added or how sticky the batter looked to you. Bake the bread for 50 minutes. At 50 minutes, take them out and poke them with toothpicks through the middle as deep as you can go. If you see any hint of the batter on the toothpick, even for only one of the bread loaves, put them all back in for another 10 minutes. Don't cook the bread for longer than 75 minutes, though. That's too long, and unless you didn't add enough flour, your bread is probably fine and in danger of drying out.
Cool and eat.
For anyone who's wondering, the first bread loaf disappeared in under 5 hours. At least two slices (in pieces) were randomly given to the little shit of a pup, who apparently likes canned pumpkin just fine, as long as it's in pumpkin bread.
OH! And I remember what I made for dinner that night -- a vegetable stir fry with homemade spicy sesame-soy sauce and sticky rice. In my distraction of all things pumpkin, I forgot to add the tofu.
.
"Very funny," I told the pup as I scraped the food into the composter, rinsed out the bowl, and gave him his dry food with a teaspoon of molasses instead. "I could've sworn that you loved pumpkin. Or is it just that you like the pumpkin I cut in half, roast, and mash up? Even though the canned stuff is practically the same thing?"
At right about that point, the Spouse comes into the kitchen and said, "Oh, good, that means you can make pumpkin pie with the rest."
I gave him a long look. "We don't have any frozen pie shells. Also, I have the plague. What makes you think I'm in any kind of mood to make the dough, roll it out, put it in a pie pan, and make pumpkin pie? Even then, I'm missing a couple of ingredients, and I'm not making it tonight, because I'm hungry and it feels like I'm breathing through a freaking bowling ball right now."
Long story short, while I was making dinner (I no longer have any recollection of what I made that night), I also somehow ended up making my lunch for the next day. When that was done, miraculously, all the ingredients I needed to make pumpkin bread appeared on the counter. I have no idea how -- I can't blame the Spouse, because he has no idea what goes in pumpkin bread other than pumpkin.
So. Pumpkin bread.
I reiterate that I had a lot of canned pumpkin, because I only used a couple of tablespoons of it, and also had no recipe to follow, so I... got creative. I also ended up making three loaves of pumpkin bread (see: "a lot of canned pumpkin") and remembered an old cooking lesson that I apparently forgot in this instance -- make sure your bowl is large enough to contain everything, or you're going to make one heck of a mess when you're mixing.
ANYWAY.
If you only want to make one loaf of pumpkin bread, make sure to divide the ingredients below by three (and round up if necessary. Since I made it up on the spot, I figure it's a pretty forgiving recipe).
Starting off without a recipe also means that I used an old standby trick that I learned more out of observation than anything else, but the ratio of mashed fruitstuff to sugar and bread is roughly 1:1:1.
Dump your canned pumpkin in a bowl. I had almost 19 oz (about 3 cups).
Add three cups of white sugar.
Add four eggs.
Add 1/3 cups water and 1/3 cups applesauce (or 2/3 to 1 cup oil).
Mix it all up.
Technically, you're supposed to beat the eggs and fold it into the sugar, then add the oil (but I do the water and applesauce because I hate using that much oil), and then mix in the pumpkin, but, fuck that, I had the plague, and if I want to mix everything together in one go, I'm mixing everything together in one go.
Add 1 TBSP baking soda.
Add 1 TBSP cinnamon, 1 TBSP cloves, 1 TBSP ginger. Technically, it should be 3 tsp of each, but I had the plague and didn't want to measure out to that level of precision. You can also add nutmeg. I normally would have, except I couldn't find any, and, you know, plague. I wasn't going to go rooting around for it.
Mix it all up.
Add 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all purpose flour. Start with 3 cups, work your way up to 3.5 cups -- but only if the consistency of the batter doesn't look sufficiently sticky to you. Don't worry too much about this step. If you added 3 cups, you added three cups. If you added three and a half, you added three and a half. It's all good.
Mix it all up.
(If your bowl is too small, like mine was, try not to be too enthusiastic while you're doing the mixing. just a tip)
Split the batter up between three prepared (sprayed with PAM or greased with butter) 7 x 11 bread pans and put them in an oven pre-warmed to 350F.
Now this is the reason why it doesn't matter how much flour you added or how sticky the batter looked to you. Bake the bread for 50 minutes. At 50 minutes, take them out and poke them with toothpicks through the middle as deep as you can go. If you see any hint of the batter on the toothpick, even for only one of the bread loaves, put them all back in for another 10 minutes. Don't cook the bread for longer than 75 minutes, though. That's too long, and unless you didn't add enough flour, your bread is probably fine and in danger of drying out.
Cool and eat.
For anyone who's wondering, the first bread loaf disappeared in under 5 hours. At least two slices (in pieces) were randomly given to the little shit of a pup, who apparently likes canned pumpkin just fine, as long as it's in pumpkin bread.
OH! And I remember what I made for dinner that night -- a vegetable stir fry with homemade spicy sesame-soy sauce and sticky rice. In my distraction of all things pumpkin, I forgot to add the tofu.
.
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no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 02:18 am (UTC)Your recipes always seem to pique my interest! <3 thanks for sharing!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 02:42 am (UTC)I thought you were chemist... Desn't that mean you understand the importance of measuring shit?!
Basically. You probably just got really lucky.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 08:23 am (UTC)Wow, that is a lot of pumpkin bread. My future mother in law made pumpkin bread recently. I hope yours turned out as good as hers did.
Stacey
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 12:54 pm (UTC)Hope you feel better soon!!
no subject
Date: 2014-02-13 01:06 pm (UTC)So. Yeah. Pumpkins!?!
Hope the plague is less plague-y... :)
(I'm also on the lookout for a good sesame-soy sauce... they don't sell the brand we liked in our other life here.)