Pumpkin Seed Sourdough Bread

We’re having a little more bread added back to our “healthy eating plan”. I’m experimenting with more whole grains . . more rustic type breads that plain sourdough with white flour.

With the pumpkin seeds already out from having roasted them, last week I decided to try a recipe using pumpkin seeds and sourdough. I still had an open bag of KAMUT® so I wanted to incorporate that also. The recipes that appealed to me were two: Baking in Saskatoon and Wild Yeast.

Here’s the recipe I came up with. While I don’t expect anyone to make a recipe exactly like I make it, what I would like for you to do, if you have any interest in making  your own bread, is this:

• look at the two recipes I started with
• compare to the changes I made
• see how easy it is to use the ingredients you have on hand or want to use

Pumpkin Seed Sourdough Bread:

Makes 1 loaf

Ingredients:
110 g. hulled pumpkin seeds, toasted
150 g. white flour
100 g. rye flour
80 g. KAMUT® flour
250 g. water
75 g. fully fed sourdough starter
10 g. honey
8 g. salt
5 g. instant  yeast
50 g. unsalted butter, at room temp

Directions:

1. Mix the flours together and add about 2/3 of the water.  Stir by hand until the flour and water are thoroughly mixed. Continue stirring for 2 – 3 minutes. Let dough rest for 5 minutes, then continue stirring for 2 – 3 more minutes. You should notice the gluten begin to develop. This is going to be a sticky dough so I didn’t even try to knead it by hand. I simply stirred it with a spoon until the gluten seemed to develop enough to hold the dough together.
2. Add all the remaining ingredients except the pumpkin seeds. Stir for several minutes. Let rest, stir another few minutes, or if you would rather knead by hand, that works too.
3. Stir in the pumpkin seeds. Transfer dough to an oiled bowl, flip the dough over so the top is oiled. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on the temp in our kitchen, or until doubled.
4. Deflate dough, without handling any more than is necessary shape into a loaf. Placed in a greased loaf pan. Make a couple of slashes in the top.  Cover loosely with oiled plastic wrap and let rise until dough has risen above the sides of the pan.
5. Preheat oven to 375º in sufficient time for the oven to be ready by the time the dough is finished rising.
6. Bake for the first 5 minutes with steam. This can be accomplished by placing a skillet on the bottom shelf of the oven (with the bread pan on the top shelf) and tossing ice cubes into the skillet. My preferred method is to use a spray bottle and spritz the sides of the oven with the spray bottle several times during those first 5 minutes.
7. Continue baking without adding steam for 35 to 40 minutes.
8. When done, remove from pan and cool on a wire rack.

Here are the photos of my project. I ground the rye and KAMUT®, added to the white flour and then poured a portion of the water into the bowl of flour.

Once the gluten had developed a bit in the flour/water mixture, I added the rest of the ingredients except the pumpkin seeds.

I’m not sure if you can see it in the photos but it is fairly easy to see when the gluten begins to develop.

Pumpkin seeds were added.

Dough was transferred to bowl to rise.

Once it was ready, it was shaped . . more like dumped into the pan. It’s a very wet dough.

It was left to rise in my warm kitchen . . probably about an hour or 1-1/2 hours.

Baked and turned out to cool.

Ready to eat!

The bread has a very nice texture. It holds together nicely for thin slicing. It makes great toast. I loved it with a little butter and jam, and it also worked well for sandwiches. There isn’t a lot of rye flavor and if you didn’t know it was in there, you’d probably not even notice it.

The next time I make it, I’m going to saute sliced jalapeno peppers in a little butter and add those to the dough.