Sourdough Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars Recipe (2024)

Our Sourdough Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars Recipe will be your favorite autumn dessert! In my opinion, pumpkin and chocolate are just meant to be baked together. By adding sourdough into the mix, it just makes it that much sweeter! Have you discovered the joy of sourdough in your kitchen yet? It’s a favorite in ours! The subtle tang it adds to recipes is the best kept secret around! Our Ultimate Guide to everything Sourdough will guide you in every step. You’ll love it!! AND our Sourdough Blueberry Pancakes are the most amazing and simple to make pancakes you’ve ever tasted!

We love Fit Friday’s!! Because we love hanging out with Miss Nichole fromPure Clean Fitness! She’s a been apart of our Friday’s for many years and we love her so much!! Thank you, Nichole, for coming every week and sharing your awesome fitness knowledge with us! If you want check out more of our Fit Friday posts thenCLICK HERE!

What is a Sourdough Starter?

When flour is mixed with liquid, the friendly bacteria (lactobacilli) and wild yeast in both the flour and your surrounding environment start working together. Within their flour-and-water slurry (now called starter), these tiny living creatures generate byproducts that cause bread to rise and give it complex, rich flavor. The sourdough starter actually carries in it the wild yeast from anywhere it has lived! Our starter came from Anchorage, Alaska, then it lived in Emigration Canyon, Utah for about a year, and lastly moved to Salt Lake City, Utah where it’s been happily living (always with me) ever since! When I share a start with people, I tell them the history and how it will naturally add more wild yeast from the air at it’s new home, too! Super cool, right?!

How to make Sourdough Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars Recipe

This recipe calls for a preferment, which is a preparation of a portion of a bread dough that is made several hours or more in advance of mixing the final dough. So, 12-24 hours before you plan to bake there are two simple steps:

1. In a large non-metallic bowl; start sourdough ferment by mixing together sourdough starter, pumpkin, milk, and flour.
2. Cover with saran wrap and ferment in a warm place for 12-24 hours.

After that it’s a fairly standard recipe procedure, with the exception being to melt the butter:

1. When ready to bake, beat together melted butter and sugar in a small bowl.
2. In a separate small bowl, whisk together salt, pumpkin pie spice, baking soda, and baking powder.
3. Mix butter mixture and egg into sourdough batter until mostly combined.
4. Sprinkle dry ingredients over the dough and stir, add chocolate chips and stir until just combined.
5. Bake 20-22 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

Ingredients in Sourdough Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars Recipe

• Sourdough Starter- Asourdough starter, also called levain, is a fermented dough filled with natural, wild yeast and a bacteria called lactobacilli. Thestarteris what makessourdough bread rise. For over 5,000 years, humans have mixed flour and water, waited for it to ferment, and then used it as leavening for bread.

• Flour- Today we using unbleached flour which has been aged naturally after being milled. It has an off-white color, which continues to dull as it ages, and a more dense grain than bleached flour.

• Liquids- A little different process on the liquids as we will make our preferment with the sourdough start, pumpkin puree, and milk. It will sit on the counter and work it’s sourdough magic for 12-24 hours. Then we are using melted butter which is hardly ever used in baking… this is the exception! 🙂

• Granulated Sugar- Granulated sugaris also sometimes known aswhite sugar, or “regular”sugar.Granulated sugarhas had all of the naturally present molassesrefined out of it. The fine crystals in granulated sugardon’t cake together, which makes it perfect for measuring, sprinkling onto food and dissolving into drinks.

• Eggs- I place my eggs in a small bowl of very warm water while I’m gathering all the other ingredients and prepping to bake then when I’m ready to add them into the batter they have reached the perfect temperature! Add your eggs one at a time and cream for 2 minutes, then scape the bowl down using a rubber spatula, and add the next egg. This is the best way to be sure the eggs are incorporated evenly into the batter. Beating each egg individually is essential because eggs act as a leavener which brings the loft (height) into your baked goods.

• Autumn Spices and Chocolate! We are using mini semi sweet chocolate chips today because it’s the perfect way to mix some chocolate love without over doing the calorie count! 🙂 Then were adding some of our favorite pumpkin pie spice to make it quick and easy!

AND the very best part, theSourdough Recipes of course!

•Smoked Gouda and Chive Sourdough Artisan Loaf

•Sourdough Coconut Banana Bread

•Blueberry Sourdough Pancakes

•Gingerbread Cake with White Chocolate Ganach

•Spelt Sourdough Loaf

•Homemade Sourdough Biscuits

Fit Friday!

You guys, the holiday season is here! Can you believe it?! I have four kids at my house, so we are definitely already feeling the Christmas season but trying not to let Thanksgiving get lost in it all. During this time of year it is easy to get lost in the festivities, the chaos, the enjoyment, the bustle of it all. Today we are talking tips to maintaining sanity and some semblance of health over the next six weeks.

Sourdough Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars Recipe

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Love Always,

Nichole, Ruthie, & Madeliene