Cranberry Pecan Pumpkin Loaf

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is Cranberry Walnut Pumpkin Loaf. I bet you thought that this would be a quick bread, right? I know I did and I was surprised when I read through the recipe and discovered it was a yeast bread! This week’s host is Rebecca at This Bountiful Backyard, and you can visit her blog to get the recipe for this very interesting bread.

I know that yeast breads take a while to make, but this one takes a really long time. It isn’t hand-on for a long time, but there is a lot of waiting. It takes two days to make these. I started the dough one evening, let it rest overnight, took it out and did stuff for most of the day, and then shaped them, let then rise again, and finally baked them. It was a lot of time! I was worried that I hadn’t kneaded the dough enough as it didn’t rise as well or as quickly as expected. Maybe my house was too cold. It had risen enough after about 3 hours and then into the refrigerator it went.

I ended up making two 3”x5” loaves and one slightly larger one, which is what is pictured here. I usually love yeast breads but I can’t say that this was one of my favorites. All I can taste in these loaves is the fresh cranberries and they are way too tart. For one piece of bread I ate around the cranberries and it was excellent. I don’t think that you can taste the pumpkin, but it gives the bread great color. So if I made these again, I would either omit the fresh cranberries or substitute dried ones. The fresh cranberries were just too much for my liking.

Recipe from Baking with Julia by Dorie Greenspan, page 108