When we make a pie crust, a teaspoon of sour cream (or crème fraîche to be more precise) is required for a little moisture and flavor. Often this means we’re opening a new container. And if you’ve bought dairy products in Germany, you know how crappy the packaging is — unresealable, and in inconvenient sizes to boot. So then there’s a barely-used, broken-seal sour cream/crème fraîche hanging around.
Fortunately, there is a solution: Pumpkin Bread. We found the recipe on food.com and gave it a shot with just a few modifications and metric conversions of our own.
1/2 cup (100g) butter
1 cup (209g) sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups (207g) flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, allspice and ginger — hit up ochef.com for some ratios to choose from)
1 cup (330g) pumpkin purée
1/2 cup sour cream or crème fraîche (100g) or 1/2 cup plain yogurt
optional chopped nuts (walnuts, pecans, whatever)
Cream the butter and sugar together. Stir in the eggs and vanilla. Stir flour, baking soda, pumpkin pie spice and salt together and add that dry mixture to the wet mixture. Add the pumpkin, sour cream, and stir. If you’re using nuts, then fold them in after the pumpkin and sour cream.
Bake in a greased/floured loaf pan at 350°F (177°C). for at least 1 hour; ours took about 1.5 hours to pass the clean-stick test.
Sorry for the seemingly random stream of consciousness that follows, but… this looks really good — however I’m a bit scared to work with actual pumpkins — I know that I’ve made stuffed pumpkin (the hokkadiokurbis specifically) — but that’s not the same pumpkin, or do you think I could use it instead? One of my biggest fears, as a single guy, living alone, is that once I open up a pumpkin, all I will be eating for the next week will be pumpkin — actual pumpkins are rather large and carry a lot of flesh.
Hi Adam,
Not a random concern at all. We actually use Hokkaidos for this and, because we have a large freezer, I roast and purée 3 or 4 at a time. But just doing one wouldn’t inundate you – a single Hokkaido roasted and puréed yields about 2-3 cups of usable pumpkin. This bread needs one cup and your standard pumpkin pie needs two. Any recipe you see that calls for “one can pumpkin pie filling” wants two cups, as the standard U.S. can is 15 ounces.
If you do make purée and you’re not going to use it within a day or so, put it in the freezer. This stuff molds at the speed of sound. Or maybe push it off on a friend :)
Leftover sour cream means Sour Cream pancakes!!! Lecker!!! http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/01/edna-maes-sour-cream-pancakes/