Week 43: Nana’s Pumpkin Bread (Playdough)

“It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to head the lessons of failure.“ ~ Bill Gates

“Failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success” ~ Arianna Huffington

“If you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.” ~ Neil Gaiman

“Bread that’s the consistency of Playdough is delicious“ ~ said no one EVER!

All popular quotes and sarcasm aside, I now embrace my failures, but it’s a skill I’ve only acquired in the past 10-15 years, and I certainly didn’t acquire this trait from my mother.

In fact, I have no recollection of conversations where she told me it was OK to fail or make mistakes, which left me with a heightened fear of failure and shame when something went awry.

My mother’s wisdom sounded more like this:

“Kit, dear, don’t roll your eyes while you’re singing, or everyone will know you made a mistake.”

“Next time, you should practice more.”

“B+ is good, but an A will get you into a good college.”

“Do you want to be good enough or exceptional?”

Do I need to go on? During much of my childhood, my mistakes were continuously pointed out, while my successes weren’t given the credit that was due. But, I choose to believe my mother—like most parents (myself included)—was doing the best she could with the tools she’d been given, which sometimes resulted in less than perfect parenting. However, I can say (with great certainty) that she put just as much pressure on herself to be perfect and was equally unkind to herself as she was to me.

Alas, as I’ve said before, the purpose of 52 Saturdays is not to whine about my childhood. Instead, it’s about acceptance, forgiveness, release, and learning. In that regard, I’m most definitely learning about mistakes.

Which is why I’m excited to say that this week’s recipe is another failure!



Original Recipe

The Process:

This recipe intrigued me, because it was an old recipe that uses traditional bread making methods, which I’ve never tried before. Apart from using a bread machine a couple of times, I’ve never used yeast or scalded milk, so I had to do a bit of research first. Apparently, it’s really a challenge to find yeast cakes, so I had to learn how to convert yeast (I found that information here) and I learned here that we likely don’t need to scald the milk, but I did anyway.

I also wanted to use fresh pumpkin, which I’ve also never done before (thank you, Creekside Cook).

The science of baking can be really tricky, especially if you don’t eat white sugar. Assuming that the sugar component of this recipe was important, I did a little homework and found out that sugar helps retain the moisture in bread, but you can reduce the amount; therefore, I went with coconut palm sugar and reduced it by half.

Oh, but then there was the shortening—it’s just gross and I don’t even really understand what it is, so I replaced that with coconut oil. At first, I thought that wouldn’t work, because I saw little chunks of coconut oil in the batter while I was mixing it, but in the end it was fine.

I replaced the milk with Goatmilk out of curiosity. I’m also wondering if it’s possible to use a dairy alternative (which as comedian Lewis Black says,  is really not milk because it doesn’t come out of a teet, it’s nut juice) to make it a vegan recipe.

Side note: have you ever tried sprouted wheat bread? It’s my favorite toast! Anyways, when I found sprouted wheat flour in the baking aisle of my grocery store I jumped at the opportunity to replace the recipe’s all-purpose flour with sprouted wheat flour.

Everything seemed to be working just fine, as you can see in the image below.
 The yeast rose properly, goatmilk held up to scalding, everything mixed together and went into the bowl to proof in the oven. Looks good, right?

The Result:
The batter came out of the bowl as expected and it formed into a beautiful loaf. I was super excited to have an excuse to eat too much bread with soup for dinner.
The baking process seemed to be going well, the aroma of delicious, warm baked bread filled the house; however, while the bread rose, it didn’t rise as much as I thought it would.

Unfortunately, when I sliced into the partially cooled loaf of bread, the inside was the consistency of playdough at the bottom. It’s possible that it just needed more baking time at a lower temp but I truly suspect that the problem was the sprouted wheat flour. Upon reading the bag again, I learned that it was not a cup-for-cup substitution, ooops!

The bag clearly stated the following: “use sprouted wheat flour in any recipe calling for whole wheat flour, or substitute for up to half the amount of all-purpose flour.”

I only read the part about using the sprouted wheat flour in any recipe calling for whole wheat flour, and because this recipe called for white flour, it’s likely that the cup-for-cup substitution of sprouted wheat was just too much and too heavy. I’m going to try it again with white flour because the flavor is actually quite good.

Not wanting to waste the pumpkin bread, I used the remainder of the loaf to make croutons and French toast, both of which were actually pretty delicious. All in all, the recipe turned out well, but we’ll chock this up to another recipe revamp to learn from, and I’ll go back to the drawing board.

UPDATE: two days later the bread was a bit more bread-lie and less like playdough, but I will still try again using less sprouted wheat flour.

This bread would be the perfect accompaniment to a big batch of chicken soup, so I’ll try to make it again (with white flour) on a particularly chilly fall day, which is surely coming sooner rather than later.

If you try the modified recipe revamp, will you please send pictures and notes?

Week 43 Recipe Pick

I’ve avoided the confections category of my mother’s recipe files because attempting to make healthy candy or confections is a challenge but in honor of Halloween, I thought this would be a good pick. There are actually very few candy recipes and I only remember her making candy for Christmas.

I do, however, clearly recall my mother making popcorn balls and caramel apples for Halloween but couldn’t find her recipe for either. My guess is she used the directions on the corn syrup jar and caramel bag or a cookbook.

 

Tags: fall, pumpkin, yeast breads