This is the pumpkin bread from Chapter Fifteen of Come In. It's Already Warm. In the book it is Alyssa's way, with an orange in it, and it starts with a line I have never been able to argue with: the can tastes like the can.
So you roast a pumpkin. It takes longer, and most of the extra time is the oven's, not yours.
Why it needs changing at altitude
Up high, the air is thinner and leavening works harder and faster. A loaf that is perfect at sea level rises too quickly at nine thousand feet, then sinks in the middle. The fix is small: a little less baking soda, a little more flour. Both are written into the recipe below, with the sea-level amounts beside them, so it works wherever your kitchen is.
What you need
Two loaves.
- 1 small sugar pumpkin
- 3½ cups flour, and 2 tablespoons more at high altitude
- 1½ teaspoons baking soda (2 at sea level)
- 1½ teaspoons salt
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon nutmeg
- ½ teaspoon cloves
- 1 orange
- 1¼ cups white sugar
- 1¼ cups brown sugar, packed
- 1 cup oil
- 4 eggs
- ¾ cup water
- Oil and salt, for the seeds
- Coarse sugar, for the tops
How to make it
- Halve the pumpkin, scoop it, and lay it face down on a pan. Roast at 400°F until a knife goes in like it's nothing, about forty-five minutes.
- Scrape the flesh into a sieve set over a bowl and mash it. Let it sit twenty minutes and give up its water, or the middle stays wet no matter how long you bake it. Measure out a little under two cups, which is what a can holds, and keep the rest for the morning.
- Rinse the seeds, dry them, toss them with oil and salt, and toast them on the low rack until they pop.
- Zest a whole orange straight onto the sugar, the brown and the white together, and work it in with your fingertips until the sugar smells more like orange than the orange does.
- Then the house loaf. Beat the oil into the orange sugar, then the eggs one at a time, then the pumpkin and the water. Whisk the flour, soda, salt and spices together, and fold the dry into the wet only until the flour disappears.
- Divide between two greased loaf pans. Scatter the tops with the seeds and a spoonful of coarse sugar. Bake at 350°F an hour, a little more, till it cracks down the middle. Nobody opens the door.
- Turn the loaves out after ten minutes. Cut one while it is still too warm. The other waits till it's cold: hand flat on the bottom, feel nothing. Then paper, towel, string. It keeps four days. It's better on the second.
It's going to be better.
Notes from the kitchen
- The draining matters. A roasted pumpkin holds more water than a can. If you skip the twenty minutes in the sieve, the middle stays wet.
- The orange goes into the sugar, not the batter. Rubbing the zest in with your fingers is where the whole loaf gets its smell.
- Give one away. It wraps well once it is cold, and it is better on the second day, which makes it the right thing to carry to somebody else's Thanksgiving.
The book it comes from
Come In. It's Already Warm. is my keeper's book: Elias and an autumn at the house at the foot of the mountain, hand-drawn maps of the country around it, seventeen plates, and the recipes the house runs on, this one among them. It comes out on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 26 November.
The signed hardcover is $79 from the house, and the Kindle edition is $9.99.