My kids and Mr. MarthaandMe love pumpkin bread. I make it every fall. I usually make two loaves and freeze one.  My November issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived and there is a pumpkin bread recipe in it. I had to give it a try. It’s a bit weird though – sage? In pumpkin bread? Brown butter I was totally on board with. I love brown butter. I make this amazing rice dish with brown butter. Brown butter is an ingredient that is overlooked, I think. So I was totally cool with using it in this.

First, I browned the butter. You add your thinly sliced sage to that while it cooks. The rest of the recipe is pretty standard  – flour (I used 1/2 cup whole wheat with 1 cup regular), nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, baking powder, eggs, brown sugar, and pumpkin.

This smelled FABULOUS when I was making it. The batter tasted great and I snitched a little with a spoon, I admit. When it was baking, it continued to smell amazing, but the smell was a little confusing. I normally associate the smell of sage with poultry, so to smell that while bread was baking was a little odd.

I made one regular size loaf – the recipe says to make 8 mini-loaves. Because of this, it needed to bake longer than the recipe said – about 50 minutes. It looked beautiful when it came out of the oven. I could barely taste the sage and I also could not really taste the brown butter, which was a big disappointment. This tasted like pumpkin bread, but with something just slightly different about it. If you didn’t know it included those ingredients, I don’t think you would ever guess they were in it. Everyone in the house ate it and everyone but Teen Martha enjoyed it. She said she thought it wasn’t sweet enough. Mr. MarthaandMe ate his with cream cheese spread on it (I think that’s yucky but he’s always done that). I don’t think I would make this again, although the recipe has now made me want to explore using brown butter in other recipes. Brown butter cookies? Brown butter muffins? The possibilities are endless.

My kids and Mr. MarthaandMe love pumpkin bread. I make it every fall. I usually make two loaves and freeze one.  My November issue of Martha Stewart Living has arrived and there is a pumpkin bread recipe in it. I had to give it a try. It’s a bit weird though – sage? In pumpkin … Read more →