Pumpkin Quick Bread

I must thank Clever Girl Writes for this idea. I’m not a big fan of pumpkin. I enjoy one pumpkin pie a year, right around Thanksgiving, otherwise I couldn’t care less about it. But now I have some guinea pigs…excuse me, my husband’s colleagues, who just so happen to be scientists (who do not do research on guinea pigs), I thought, “why not?”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with making muffins using the muffin ratio of 2:2:1:1 flour to liquid to egg to fat. I’ve done mostly blueberry muffins as that’s what my husband likes, but I’ve been meaning to expand into doing quick breads since they use the exact same ratio.

With Fall in full swing, and with pumpkins popping up everywhere, Clever Girl Writes’ post about pumpkin bread came at just the right time. I started wondering if I could make pumpkin bread. After all, I do have a whole group of people to test it out.

There were two things I had to take into consideration: it had to be egg-free and I needed to know what the pumpkin was replacing, or if it did replace anything. It does. It replaces the liquid. Everything else remains the same. I haven’t tried it with eggs yet, so what I have here uses applesauce. I mean, apples are a Fall fruit, after all…

Ingredients for Pumpkin Quick Bread

• applesauce
• fat (typically butter or oil)
• flour
• pumpkin puree
• pumpkin pie spice
• optional: milk (if you don’t have enough puree to equal twice the weight of the applesauce)
• sugar (I prefer brown here, but you can use whatever you prefer)
• baking powder and baking soda

The Long Instructions

Step 1: Preheat oven to 400 degrees and prepare a loaf pan with either parchment paper or simply greased.

Step 2: Weigh the applesauce. From my research, one egg can be replaced by 1/4 cup of applesauce, but, when I did that, I ended up with an extremely vertically challenged loaf (about half the height of the one pictured here). I tried it again keeping in mind the weight of an egg. One egg weighs approximately 50 grams, so, if I usually use 2 eggs, that’s about 100 grams. That means I weighed out somewhere around 100 grams of applesauce. However many eggs you’d like to use, assume an approximate weight of 50 grams and multiply it from there.

Step 3: Weigh the fat (typically butter or oil) so it weighs about the same as the eggs/applesauce. If you’re using butter, melt it.

Step 4: Weigh the flour so it weighs about twice as much as the applesauce. Then add 2-4 tablespoons of sugar per egg/50 grams of applesauce, pumpkin pie spice (I added 2 teaspoons for 100 grams of applesauce), and baking powder and baking soda so that combined it’s about 1 teaspoon per cup of flour (I used 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda).

Step 5: Weigh the pumpkin puree so it weighs about the same as the flour. If you don’t have enough, just add milk to make up the difference.

Step 6: Combine the dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately. Then gently incorporate the wet ingredients into the dry. Mix until just combined.

Step 7: Pour into the prepared loaf pan. Spread it out so the batter reaches all corners and sides and the top is relatively flat.

Step 8: Put into oven and turn temperature down to 375 degrees. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until the top is golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Step 9: Cool for a few minutes in pan and then turn out onto a cooling rack. Enjoy!

The Short Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and prepare loaf pan by greasing or using parchment paper.
2. Weigh applesauce.
3. Weigh fat so it is equal to the applesauce. If using butter, melt it.
4. Weigh flour so it is twice the weight of the applesauce.
5. Weigh pumpkin puree so it is equal to the flour.
6. Mix flour, sugar, pumpkin pie spice, and baking powder and baking soda.
7. Mix pumpkin puree, applesauce, and fat.
8. Gently incorporate the wet ingredients into the dry until just combined.
9. Pour into loaf pan and even it out.
10. Put into oven and turn temperature down to 375 degrees. Bake 35-40 minutes or until toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean.

For more recipes or my adventures in ratio baking, be sure to stop by the Kitchen.