pumpkin bread part two

I have a new love, and it's name is brown rice syrup. Thick, golden, subtle; this is grown-up sweet. I could have eaten it out of the jar by the spoonful. But I didn't. Or rather, I did, but only the one spoonful.

Brown rice syrup is considered a whole food. It's made by cooking brown rice in water, then evaporating most of the liquid to leave behind a golden brown honey-like syrup. It's less sweet than sugar, and has a malty flavor. I could see it working well as a glaze for cinnamon rolls or sticky buns, or even over ice cream in place of caramel.

For my first adventure with this new-to-me sweetener I revisited pumpkin bread. I used the same recipe mentioned in this post as my starting point, substituting the whole wheat pastry flour and coconut oil, then replaced the brown and white sugar with 1 cup of sucanat and 1/3 cup of brown rice syrup.

My hope was that the extra moisture provided by the syrup would make the end result just a touch more moist than the previous version; and it did. The bread looks and feels less coarse, and the moisture level is closer to the original recipe. It's less sweet, though, since brown rice syrup is a milder sweetener. Guess I'll tweak that next.