Recipe: no sugar banana bread

I wrote last week that I was going to go on a ‘no added sugar’ diet for a few weeks. I have been sorta successful in this project. I relented on Sunday when friends phoned me to say they were in town with their kids and taking them to have ice cream. How could I say no to that? But that’s the only thing I’ve had in more than a week. The fact that I was sick from Wednesday night till Saturday surely helped, so here’s to another week. And to start off this week, I thought I should try some baking again. Of course it has to be wheat/ gluten free, and this time without sugar, honey or agave syrup too. And I found such a recipe for a no added sugar banana bread.

No added sugar banana bread with additional walnuts & cranberries

This is probably the easiest recipe ever! You simply gather your ingredients, mash your bananas, and simply add the rest. Whisk it together (you don’t even need an electric mixer for this), grease a loaf pan and bake for 45 minutes. The texture is a bit brittle. It falls apart easily and when I attempted to take it out of the pan, I hadn’t let the loaf cool completely, which led it to break and the entire top was still stuck as well.

The reason why this recipe doesn’t need sugar is because of the bananas. You need 4 of them: the browner they are the better. Because the riper your bananas the sweeter they will be. What I did to make sure the ingredients would mix, is blend the bananas together with the eggs with a hand blender before adding all the other ingredients. If you have a blender that can blend doughs than I think you could also put all the ingredients in your blender and let it do it for you.

I can recommend adding in some nuts and dried berries as it gives the bread a bit more of a bite. I went with walnuts and cranberries. I used roughly 75 grams of walnuts and 100 grams cranberries. I made sure to purchase a type of cranberry with the smallest amount of sugar. I chopped the walnuts in half and soaked the cranberries in hot water for 10 minutes. Drained them and patted them dry with a paper towel. I also added more cinnamon than called for, but that’s because I love cinnamon and can’t get enough of it. I used roughly 2 heaping teaspoons of cinnamon.

It’s not a cheap recipe. The recipe states you have to use coconut flour, no other flour and I can see why. In the original post many people were complaining about their breads being soggy and I think if you were to make this with almond flour the bread would become soggier as that has many more fats in it than coconut flour. So coconut flour it is, but that is not something that is easily available, nor does it come cheap once you found it. I figured it would be a nice change up from the endless amounts of almond flour I have been eating over summer.

The recipe below includes my adaptations. I found the original recipe on this website.

Ingredients:

4 very ripe bananas, mashed

1/3 cup coconut oil or grass-fed butter, melted

3 free-range eggs

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

2 heaping tsp cinnamon

½ cup coconut flout (do not substitute another flour – it will not work)

1 heaping tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

75 grams halved walnuts

100 grams soaked & dried cranberries (least amount of sugar)

optional add-ins: 1/3 cup dark chocolate chips, walnuts, pecans, slivered almonds, raisins, etc.

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 180 C/ 350 F. Throw everything together in a medium bowl and mix until combined. Pour into a lightly greased (use coconut oil or butter for greasing) bread pan and bake for about 45 minutes or until center is set and top is golden. Enjoy!

The result?

A delicious, yet definitely less sweet banana bread. This is a great treat as a snack and may even serve as breakfast. French toast banana bread anyone?