Pumpkin Pan for Bread

[BakerAunt]

Over 20 years ago, I bought a two-part cast aluminum pumpkin mold from King Arthur. It came with a recipe for Malty Wheat Bread. I eventually tried the recipe a couple of years later, but the dough did not come close to filling the pan, so it was a one-sided pumpkin, with good texture and taste. I never got around to trying the recipe again, although each autumn, I would see the mold with my other fall baking items. I did not recall where the recipe was. I was not on the King Arthur Baking Circle at the time, as I was unaware of its existence, so I did not troubleshoot the recipe, and King Arthur was no longer selling the pan.

I found the recipe the other day while trying to clean out some files, and I had written my notes on it. I now have more baking experience, and my first thought is that there is not enough dough to fill the pan completely. I measured the halves. The larger half is about 5 1/2 cups, while the smaller side is about 5 cups.

Here are the recipe ingredients:

1 1/2 cups water
2 cups King Arthur AP flour
1 1/2 cups King Arthur whole wheat flour (white or traditional)
3/4 cup malted wheat flakes
1/4 cup malted milk
2 Tbs. molasses
2 Tbs. oil
2 tsp. instant yeast
1 1/2 tsp. salt.

I am thinking that I need a recipe with at least 6 cups of flour in order to fill the pan. I'd like to get feedback from people here at Nebraska Kitchen as to whether I am on the right track. I'm thinking that a recipe that fills a 10 x 5 loaf pan might be the way to go.

Further Note: The pan is not made the way the traditional lamb pan was made in that the top does not fit into the bottom section but merely rests on top. I would probably weight in down with a cast iron skillet, which I also do with the lamb cake pan. I might also need to put it on a lower shelf, as it is on spiked legs, which are also on the top part, probably so that one could just bake a cake in it as two halves.

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[kimbob]

IDK. 6 cups of flour seems like a lot. Try taking a pic of the mold using Google lens and see if you get any hits.

[Mike Nolan]

If all else fails, try getting an estimate of the volume of each half of the mold using something like rice or beans, or possibly even just water. Then, depending on the recipe, make enough dough to fill the mold about 3/4 full.

Estimating the volume of an irregular object is challenging. There should be some apps that can do this if your phone has a LIDAR-capable camera, but I haven't found one I could use for bread yet.

I have a long term ambition to create an 'encyclopedia of bread shapes', giving things like surface area, volume and maximum depth for bread shapes, as part of my long-held opinion that shape is a relatively unexplored aspect of bread taste and texture. I started by making up a list of all the bread shapes I could think of, I had at least 100 shapes, and I was just getting started listing things like braided shapes.

[BakerAunt]

The volume of both sides is 10 1/2 cups.

[Mike Nolan]

Hmm, that probably means you need somewhere between 3 and 4 pounds of bread dough, depending on how much it rises. I'd probably aim for 3 to 3 1/4 pounds myself.

[BakerAunt]

Thanks, Mike. I've taken to weighing my dough in grams, so 3 1/4 pounds would be about 1474 grams.

[BakerAunt]

Here is a link to a blog that has pictures of the pumpkin mold. He is baking a cake, so you will see the two halves baked separately.

https://www.goodthingsbydavid.com/2015/11/creating-pumpkin-shaped-cake.html

[BakerAunt]

I am baking the bread in the pumpkin mold today. I decided to use my recipe for "Mostly Whole Wheat Maple Buttermilk Bread, as I recalled that I bake it as two smaller loaves (7 1/2 x 4-inch) with a dough amount close to what Mike suggested. That recipe has too much dough for two 8x5 pans but not enough for two 9x5 pans. It fits perfectly in a 10x5 pan. Each side of the mold is about the size of one of the 7 1/2 x 4-inch loaf pans.

The dough weighs 1450 grams. It fills the lower mold. I've put the other mold on top and weighted it down with a flat iron griddle. It is now on its second rise. After an hour, without looking at it, I will bake it and report back. This bread recipe has fantastic oven spring, so I am hoping for a great result. If it comes out well, I will try to post a picture.

[BakerAunt]

The dough filled the bottom mold, so I was hopeful. I weighed it down with an iron griddle with a handle (handle was a mistake). When I moved it to the oven, the top was already trying to come off. Eight minutes into the bake, it popped the griddle off and tipped. I was able to remove the top, put the griddle under those spindly legs, which I should have done in the first place, and put the righted loaf back in the oven. The top does show where the pan slid, so the pumpkin is lopsided, but it had begun to take the indentations of the mold before I lost the top. Because of the depth of the bread, it took about 65 minutes to bake to 190 F. I covered it for the final 10 minutes with foil because the part outside of the mold was overbrowning.
What I would do next time: Use 50 grams less dough. Put the mold on the flat griddle so that it will be stable. Weigh down the mold with the lid of my large Le Creuset pot. That way the weight is directly on the entire mold. Ideally, there would be some kind of clamp to hold the two parts together. I'll give some thought to whether I can rig something that would work.
The side that was on the bottom is beautiful with lovely indentations, the other side is, as I noted, a lopsided, overbrowned mess.

It looks like one of those unfinished sculptures where one side is beautifully detailed and emerging from an uncut stone.

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