How to Make a Beautiful Halloween Pumpkin Bread

How's it going my bakers, hope you're having an excellent day so far. Welcome back to another video. Today I'm making a beautiful pumpkin shaped bread. So let's get in the kitchen and see how it's done. Pumpkin or butternut squash have never been my favorite vegetables. They're just too sweet by themselves. But saying that, I must admit that I do love sweet potato. There's just something about the flavor of pumpkin plus the sweetness that doesn't go well with me. But they do work really well in a bread dough recipe such as this one. And since it's shaped like a pumpkin, might as well contain pumpkin. This is not my first pumpkin shaped bread recipe. A few years ago I made a sourdough pumpkin bread. You can still find it on my channel. Let's get on with this simplified commercial yeast version. Here's what we'll need to make this bread. Some white bread flour, a little bit of whole wheat bread flour, yeast, salt, a little bit of olive oil and a pumpkin or butternut squash. I couldn't find any small pumpkins at the supermarket so I went with the butternut squash. They're the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Another thing we'll need is an egg for glazing. But you can certainly use a different glaze. And we'll need a cinnamon stick for decoration. But it'll work just fine without it too. As for the equipment, we'll need a bowl, scales, a dough scraper, a temperature probe, a brush, some food safe butcher's string, which you can find in my Amazon shop link down below. And last but not least, I'll be baking my bread in my Lodge cast iron combo cooker. It will create the best result, but it's by no means essential. You can just as successfully bake this bread on a regular baking tray. But if you are serious about bread making, this is a well worth investment. It will last a lifetime and more. And it will allow you to bake the bread in the best possible way. Okay, let's begin. And it all starts with the butternut squash. But if you are using a pumpkin, you'll start with a pumpkin. Regardless, you want to peel it, remove the seeds and cut into large chunks. Spread it out on a baking tray, cover with some foil and bake it for around one hour at 180 degrees Celsius or 350 Fahrenheit. You can boil it too, but baking will intensify the flavor more. Cook it until it's completely soft and you're able to mash it easily with a fork. And you could certainly use a fork to mash the pumpkin, or you could use a potato masher. Pass it through a sieve perhaps to get rid of any large chunks. But if you have a food processor or Nutribullet like the one I use, then that will be your best option. It will ensure that the pumpkin is completely smooth. I did cool the pumpkin down completely before blending it. This blender is so powerful, I'm always afraid it will blow up. So cooling down the ingredient is just a good precaution. Anyway, in order to make bread dough, we need this to cool down to room temperature at least. And let us move on to that now. Transfer the puree to a large bowl, add the yeast, the salt, the olive oil and the whole wheat flour. Give it a good mix to dissolve the salt and yeast. Then add the white bread flour and mix it to a dough. There is no additional water in this recipe. All the water is replaced by the pumpkin puree. And you can use other vegetable purees in the same way. This will not only give our bread an awesome color, it will also add a nice sweetness and a distinct flavor. If you don't want to mess around with cooking and mashing pumpkins, you can use thin pumpkin. But fresh will always be best. I'm going to cold ferment this dough, but you can ferment at room temperature if you want to. Give it two hours of bulk fermentation with the fold halfway through. If your dough is warmer, it will ferment more rapidly. If it's cooler, it will take longer. Keep an eye on it. When it comes to cold fermentation, you want to place the dough in the fridge right after mixing. Let it cool down for 30 minutes, then pull it out and give it a fold. This dough is not very sticky. You still want to wet your hands. To perform the fold, pick the dough up in the air, then fold the sides down and push them back up into the center of the dough. Keep doing this until you have a nice tight dough ball. After folding, place it back into the bowl, cover it up, leave it in the fridge to cold ferment for 18 to 24 hours. On the next day, it should look something like this. Nice and puffy, full of signs of good fermentation. Now from this point, you could go straight to final shaping, but I decided to add the pre-shaping step. I want the loaf to be nice and smooth, nice and uniform, nice and tight. Shaping it twice will increase my chances of getting that. Okay, here's how it goes. Dust the dough with flour, drop it out on the table, the smooth side down. Then flatten it out, fold the edge over the middle just a few times. You don't want it too tight. Then flip it smooth side up again, cover it and leave it to rest for 30 minutes. If you are going with room temperature fermentation, skip the pre-shaping step. Go straight to final shaping and final proofing. At this point, it will already be fermenting quite rapidly and if you give it another extra half an hour, it might run away from you. But if you are cold bulk fermenting, after resting, you can move on to final shaping, which goes exactly the same way as the pre-shape did. But this time, we want to shape it slightly more tightly. Give it a light dusting of flour to avoid any stickage. Once again, place the dough with the smooth side down on the table, flatten it out, fold the edge over the middle, go around in a circle, the reach point where I started. Then flip it smooth side up again, tighten it against the table. That's the final shaping done. Now we'll start creating the unique pumpkin design. Take a piece of non-stick baking paper. I like to use a round piece because it fits nicely in my pan. Then lay eight lengths of string across it. To ensure that they lay down nice and straight, you want to moisten the strings with water. It would work with six pieces of string, but eight will make a better design. Place the dough in the center of the strings, then cover it up and leave it for the final proof, which will take around an hour and a half. During the final hour of fermentation, you want to preheat the oven and your baking vessel to 180 degrees Celsius, 355 Fahrenheit, fan on. That'll be 200 Celsius or 390 Fahrenheit, fan off. As a rule of thumb, there should be 10% difference between the settings. Having the fan on essentially makes it hotter. Okay, once the dough looks nice and puffy, it's ready for the oven. We just need to glaze it and then tie it up. To get an extra rich crust, I decided to go with the double glaze technique, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Brush the loaf with egg once, then leave to dry for five minutes, and then brush it again. To make this bread plant-based, you could use any other glaze that you like, or just leave it plain. It will still turn out beautiful. Okay, there are a couple things to note when tying it up. The first is that you should not tie the string too close to the loaf. We need to leave it some space for expansion. Do a double knot so it doesn't come undone. And secondly, make sure you tie the correct strings together. That is why having them laid out perfectly straight is very important. Tying the two wrong ends together will ruin the design. After tying up the loaf, pick up the loose ends of string and cut them off. If you don't cut them off, they'll obviously leave marks on the loaf. And last but not least, take half a piece of a cinnamon stick and push it right down into the center of the dough. If the strings are a little bit wonky and the gaps between the segments are smaller and larger in some places, now is your last chance to organize them. But if you're happy with it, you can get it in the oven. Remove your preheated baking vessel from the oven, take off the lid, then lift the loaf gently up and place it in the pan. Cover it and put it in the oven. The initial bake will take 25 minutes. After 25 minutes of baking, remove the pan from the oven, then remove the lid and place the loaf back into the oven for another 10 minutes of baking. If you want the crust to be a little bit darker, you can bake it for longer, but 10 minutes to finish off the crust was enough for me. Leave the loaf to cool down, ideally on a rack. Once it has cooled down, we can remove the strings. Now the egg glaze will make the strings stick to the loaf a little bit, so peel them off carefully. First cut them all in half, then remove them one by one. And there you have it. That's how you make a beautiful pumpkin shaped bread. The crumb and the crust are extremely soft and the vegetable puree adds a delicious natural sweetness. Alright, that's another Halloween recipe out of the way. Don't forget to check out my charcoal black cherry tomato flatbread and my black charcoal donuts, all of which should be great hits with your friends and family. So what do you think of this little pumpkin? Let me know down in the comments. If you want to see more videos like this one, click over here. Subscribe to the channel, click right here. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.