Miso and hazelnut pumpkin bread

A very gourd cake

Today I’m sharing my recipe for miso and hazelnut pumpkin “bread”. It’s probably my favourite use of this autumnal vegetable so I hope you enjoy it as well. I’m also thinking about savoury flavours in desserts.

Let’s go…

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The cut-through. Miso pumpkin bread.

My four-year-old is, like most four-year-olds, a fussy eater.

This is why it gave me such joy last week when, having given him a slice of this rich, fudgy, toffee-like cake, he professed how yummy it was. And in particular, how much he liked the chocolate chips.

It was then I told him they were actually nuts.

This was were I screwed up.

He took another bite, and swiftly corrected himself.

“Too much nuts,” he said, putting the cake back down. “It’s ingusting.”

Translation: disgusting.

I hope you enjoy it as much as he did before finding out what he was really eating.

Miso and savoury flavours in desserts

So, why miso? Well, this ingredient adds a fantastic depth to “earthy” sweet dishes. Things like this spiced banana bread or dark Swedish chocolate cake. The miso adds such a delicious, almost floral, quality. And because miso is so salty, it also does a similar job enhancing flavour as the salt does in salted caramel.

Here’s my advice, if you have a favourite sweet dish that is based on nuts, chocolate, spice, caramel or coffee, experiment with a touch of umami-rich white miso. I think you’ll be very pleased.

This works both ways, too. I’m really interested in using traditionally umami/savoury flavours in sweet dishes. My mushroom chocolate tart is a recent example of that. My thinking is that “earthy” savoury flavours, things like potatoes, beets, parsnips, and mushrooms are particularly suited to use in desserts. If you feel like experimenting, that’s were I recommend you begin.

I love it when two ingredients merge to create something more than the sum of their parts. And together, miso and sweetened pumpkin creates an unmistakable toffee-like flavour of delicately caramelised sugar and butter.

The cake would be lovely without the nuts but I just really enjoy the texture they bring. And of course, the flavour goes so well with the miso and nutty, autumnal pumpkin.

A recipe for miso and hazelnut pumpkin bread

This cake keeps for days and days without refrigeration and gets ever so slightly moister as it ages if kept in plastic wrap. But my tip is to enjoy at least some of this while it still maintains a gesture of the oven’s warmth. At this temperature, the cake manifests an almost set pudding-like texture from the moisture of the pumpkin, and is just lovely with a simple vanilla ice cream.

Ingredients

350g cooked and pureed pumpkin (I used leftover roasted hokkaido pumpkin)
250g sugar
2 heaped tablespoons of white miso
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
170g salted butter (room temp)
300g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 eggs
70g hazelnuts

Method

Roast your hazelnuts at 180°C until they’ve turned from white to a tan brown and your kitchen smells incredible. If you have skin on hazelnuts, the skins will also be splitting and starting to peel off at this stage. I peel them by letting them cool a bit and rubbing them between my hands. It’s quick work doing it this way and a bit of skin here and there does no harm. Once they are roasted and skinned, crush them lightly. You don’t want them too fine, chunky is good. Keep the oven at 180°C, that’s the temperature for the cake to bake at as well.

Beat your butter, miso, and sugar with an electric whisk until you notice it getting fluffier and turning a lighter shade. Crack your eggs into a bowl and beat them together. Slowly whisk this into the butter and sugar bit by bit. Then add your pumpkin (make sure this is room temp) and vanilla and whisk until everything is fully combined. Then add your hazelnuts and stir them in.

Sieve your baking powder into your plain flour and add this to your pumpkin mix. Fold it in as efficiently as you can. Pumpkin puree can vary in water percentage so if the batter seems dry, add a splash of milk. The consistency you want is what is called (at least by the culinary school teachers I still hear in my nightmares dreams) “reluctant dropping consistency”. This means if you take a large spoonful, the mix is loose enough to slowly fall off after a few seconds by its weight alone.

Line a 10 inch/25cm loaf pan with baking paper and add your batter. Pop in your heated oven and don’t bother it for an hour. Then check if a skewer poked into the middle comes clean. It may take another 15 minutes.

It will emerge dark brown on the outside and the yellow of autumn sunsets on the inside.

I hope you enjoy.

See you next week. Hopefully I’ll be a chapter closer to being a novelist by then.

Wil