I thought banana bread was my thing, until I tried this. I don’t mind the extra steps and long list of spices as long as it’s worth it. And this Pumpkin Bread is certainly worth it.
Pumpkin Bread — it’s full of the spices and flavor you love in pumpkin pie but in a delicious, savory-sweet bread that you can spread with soft butter, honey, cream cheese, jellies, and jams–virtually anything goes with a bread this yummy.
My parents love chunks of pumpkin bread served in a bowl with milk and sugar, for a bedtime snack. My kids love it with ice cream.
Pumpkin Bread is actually one of the healthier sweet breads you can eat. It’s hard to get nutrients for the eye in any food alone. But pumpkins contain 209% of your RDA for beta carotene for your eyes but also those crucial antioxidants lutein and zeaxanthin as well. It’s one of the few vegetables/fruits to contain all three of these. So you can feel good about eating pumpkin bread.
Pumpkins are also a smart, sustainable staple. These fruits can be stored an entire year without heating, freezing, or refrigerating.
Making your pumpkin bread with real pumpkins, especially a smaller, real pie pumpkin peeled, steamed, and mashed or baked and mashed with a fork to get even more flavor into your Pumpkin Bread.
Make it your way
This recipe is also highly customizable. Some chefs add raisins or dates to make this a very rich and dense take on fruit cake. I like to add butterscotch chips to mine, which add a sweet flavor that my kids love. What’s really scrumptious on this particular Pumpkin Bread recipe is a simple powdered sugar glaze made with powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla. It’s simply sublime when poured over this gorgeous cracked-top bread.
This is a looong baking bread and it’s a very moist one as well. For that reason, it needs to bake for 50 minutes or more to ensure doneness. Checking the middle with a toothpick is also wise.
For this recipe, you’ll want to make sure to get your flours and other dry ingredients measured perfectly–that means no “guess-timating” like your mother might have done sometimes with a handful of flour. She was probably making gravy–not a bread. For bread, you want to knife level all cups of dry ingredients. Too little flour, and this bread will never set.
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 cup canned pumpkin puree
- 1/2 cup almond milk (or any preferred milk)
- 1/2 cup cane sugar
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil (or other neutral oil)
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
Prep time – 20 minutes
Cooking time – 50 minutes
Yields – 8 servings
Step 1: Start by preheating your oven to 350°F (175°C) and greasing an 8×4-inch loaf pan to ensure your bread doesn’t stick.
Step 2: In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. This will be your dry mix.
Step 3: In a larger bowl, combine the pumpkin puree, almond milk, sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. Whisk these wet ingredients until they’re smooth and well blended.
Step 4: Gently fold the dry ingredients into the wet mixture. Stir until just combined to keep the bread tender—be careful not to overmix.
Step 5: Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 45 to 50 minutes. Check doneness by pressing lightly on the top of the bread; it should spring back, or insert a toothpick in the center that should come out clean.
FAQs & Tips
To make ahead, store all dry ingredients into a ziplock bag, ready and waiting to pour into the creamed butters and sugars–a huge time-saver. Pumpkin bread keeps very well and can be kept refrigerated, sliced or unsliced up to ten days or frozen and kept for three months.
Using whole nutmeg grated onto a mat or plate and measure adds extreme flavor and aids in flavor quality. Nutmeg is a spice that is seasonal–no telling how long that’s been sitting on your store shelf if you don’t buy it whole.
In the fall, I make a huge container of Pumpkin Bread sandwiches–that means cream cheese spread between two pieces of Pumpkin Bread and cut into small squares. I take a big container of these to tailgating parties and always have a lot of new and old friends hovering around my gate that day.
Serving Suggestions
You cannot get more decadent than a Christmas or Thanksgiving breakfast with Perfect Baked Eggs and, on the side, Pumpkin Bread with my infamous Pumpkin Dip.
Pumpkin Bread
Ingredients
- 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
- 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 cup canned pumpkin puree
- 1/2 cup almond milk or any preferred milk
- 1/2 cup cane sugar
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil or other neutral oil
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Start by preheating your oven to 350°F (175°C) and greasing an 8×4-inch loaf pan to ensure your bread doesn’t stick.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. This will be your dry mix.
- In a larger bowl, combine the pumpkin puree, almond milk, sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla extract. Whisk these wet ingredients until they’re smooth and well blended.
- Gently fold the dry ingredients into the wet mixture. Stir until just combined to keep the bread tender—be careful not to overmix.
- Pour the batter into your prepared loaf pan. Bake in the preheated oven for about 45 to 50 minutes. Check doneness by pressing lightly on the top of the bread; it should spring back, or insert a toothpick in the center that should come out clean.
