Banananana… You won't know when to stop with this nut bread

Over the course of time, most of my old cravings for forbidden (trigger-laden) foods have disappeared. For example, I no longer pine for strawberries every time The Bat brings home a quart of fresh ones for herself and Pop. Grapes come in and go out without my feeling the desire to pope one in my mouth and stop breathing… but breads are a much harder habit to break. 

Worse still, I have desperately missed dessert-y quick breads, like the classic banana-nut loaf which usually happened at least once a month when I was younger – after my brugly other stopped inhaling the fruits, and the occasional banana was allowed to go a little overripe. During those years, The Bat would take out the extra-long loaf pan (the 5x16 incher) and load it up with batter, filling the house with that sweet, heady aroma. If we were lucky, there would also be a brick of cream cheese on the counter when the bread was finished baking, to add a little bite, a little extra richness to the treat. But once wheat was put on my list of things to be avoided, I would glance longingly at those fruits on the counter as they started to show brown spots.

No more, though!  I can have my cake, and eat it, too. 

Welllll… technically, no. I can have my banana bread, though, and make it lower in carbs at the same time I make it wheat-free. This makes it slightly more virtuous a feast, until I slather that cream cheese all over it and treat it as if it were cupcake frosting.

Granted, it's a fairly heavy version of banana bread – Pop likes his to be a little more on the lightly cakey side, whereas this comes out dense, like a pound cake. Still, it's banana-y, nutty, and moist. What's not to like? 

Rich, nutty, fruity, and good for you…like a bran muffin, only without the whole bran muffin attitude 

 


Banana Bread with Coconut Flour

Ingredients:

7 large eggs at room temperature
3 Tablespoons honey
1/2 cup coconut oil or butter, melted
1 cup mashed ripe bananas
1 cup sifted coconut flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350° F.

Grease a standard glass loaf pan.

In a large bowl, and with Paddle attachment (not dough hook or whisk) combine eggs, honey, oil, and mashed bananas, beat until well blended.

In a separate bowl, sift together coconut flour, salt, baking powder and soda. Whisk in nuts, if you are including them. 

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet, in the mixer bowl. Mix until completely combined.

Pour into greased loaf pan, place on middle rack of oven. Bake 1 hour. 

Remove from oven, allow to cool 10 minutes in pan.  

Remove from pan,  allow to cool completely on rack.

This bread is better if allowed to stand overnight. Serve with cream cheese brought to room temperature to soften, for greater cake-like awesomeness.

Not A Bad Way To Loaf: Coconut Flour Bread

Under normal circumstances, some things don't really go together. For example, I had a great honkin' canister of coconut flour on my counter, and a deep and abiding need for a slice of bread and butter. Generally, when I say I want bread and butter, it means I crave a slice of yeasty perfection – something I had thought I needed to give up when I cut wheat out of my diet a couple of years back. The dry-ish coconut flour was nowhere in the vicinity of meeting that need.

After all, the best bread in the world involves ooey, gooey stretchy gluten, right?

I really have tried a number of different blends of flours, and pretty much all the mixes on the market for baking a sandwich loaf, and, while they are (most of them) quite sufficiently tasty and firm for making a BLT, toasted or not, none of the ones I tried held my interest when treated to a coating of plain, simple butter. They just didn't measure up to Great-Aunt Helen's fresh farm-baked bread at the forefront of my memories. Well, that should come as no surprise. Helen's bread had the magical element of love. But that's beside the point. Her clean, simple recipe is pretty much impossible to imitate without the exact same ingredients. And I shouldn't have been trying.

I needed a small slab of something above and beyond merely "acceptable", upon which to spread my butter.  So I gave up on the not-so-cheap copies, and went back to the search. I found this recipe.

In my 1.5 quart pyrex loaf pan, the batter was dwarfed, producing a loaf approximately 1 inch high at the center of the rise. While that's not a terrible shape for biscotti, either I was going to have to go buy a new, smaller loaf pan, or I was going to have to adjust the recipe upward to make a loaf, not a rectangular pancake.

My budget helped me decide, so I opted for the latter.

Besides, I was expecting company for dinner at the end of the week, so, why not make enough to share (if I absolutely have to)?

It took a couple of tries to get it right, though, (my first large loaf was underdone in the center) so I'm glad I didn't wait until the last minute to learn.

What I ended up with was still not a great domed loaf of fluffy, puffy, yeasty, crusty farm bread, but it holds its moisture, and it holds a nice layer of butter…plus, it uses some of that great honkin' canister of coconut flour I wasn't sure I'd ever find good use for.*

And it tastes pretty good with a couple of slices of bacon, some lettuce, and a slice of vine-ripened tomato. Hold the mayo.

Coconut Flour Bread (large-ish loaf)

Ingredients:

110 grams (1 cup sifted) coconut flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
8 large eggs
3 Tablespoons honey
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
3/4 teaspoon salt


Directions:

With rack in middle of the oven, preheat to 325º F.

Grease loaf pan (I like to use real butter for this, but you can use the spray stuff, if you absolutely must).

In a small bowl, sift together coconut flour and baking powder. Set aside.

Using the paddle attachment (not the dough hook) for your stand mixer, combine eggs, honey, butter, coconut oil, and salt. (If you don't have a stand mixer, just use regular beaters of your hand-held mixer.)

When they are thoroughly mixed, gradually add in the dry ingredients and mix well. Your dough should look a lot like thick cornbread batter.

Spread dough in the loaf pan, smoothing top with lightly moistened spatula or lightly wetted fingers. Place in center of oven, bake 60-70 minutes, until top has begun to brown.

Remove from oven and from baking pan, allow to cool completely on rack.




*This is to regular yeast bread what pound cake is to angel food cake: greater density, but still a tasty option.

"C"is for Cookie, and for Coconut, too: Shortbread for the Rest of Us

While I was baking a pie crust from coconut flour, I began to wonder if I could make a tasty shortbread cookie from it, as well.

Long story short, it seems that I can. 

So can you.

A word of advice, though: if you have to refrigerate some of the dough for any reason, you will need to warm it back up on low power in a microwave oven before you can work it into balls. The shortening (butter or coconut oil recommended) needs to be pretty much liquified in the dough in order for the dough to hold together.

Also, they don't keep well. Eat or freeze within an hour or so of baking.

  

Coconut Shortbread Cookies

Ingredients:

3/4 cup coconut flour

1/2 cup butter or coconut oil, melted

3 to 4 Tablespoons honey (to taste)

1 teaspoon fresh finely grated lime (or lemon) zest

1/2 teaspoon real vanilla extract

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350º F. 

Line a baking sheet with parchment or a nonstick silicone liner.

In a small bowl, combine all ingredients, stir until it reaches a thick, pasty consistency.

Shape into approximately 1-inch diameter balls and set on lined baking sheet. With a fork, press down gently on the tops of the dough balls to flatten a bit. 

Bake about 7 to 10 minutes, until lightly browned – keep an eye on them, they will go from golden to dark brown very quickly! 

Allow to cool completely before removing from cookie sheet (handling the cookies while they're still hot will cause them to crumble).

Makes about 40 one-bite cookies.

Serve with light brunch of fruit compote and cacao nib "tea". Or whatever food and beverage floats your boat.

A Peach of a Pie... Peach Curd in a Coconutty Shell, and THEN Some

In case anybody had failed to figure this out, yet…I like food. I like to eat it, I like to look at it, I like to read about it, I like to photograph and paint it and I like to talk (and write) about it. But most of all,  I like to prepare it. Of course, nine times out of ten, when I prepare something, I'm expected to eat it, since I don't work for a professional kitchen (and, no, I have no real desire to do so, since I enjoy the freedom that a private home kitchen affords me).

Now is the season of birthdays in our circle, and this, of course, grants me the excuse to bake unabashedly, and with great variety, with fewer concerns about my own personal girth. The treats get shared, or even given away.

In this case, one of my long-time friends, like me, is on a restricted regimen…she's on an allergy- and celiac-diet – gluten free – and her daughter-in-law has been encouraging her to try, as much as possible, a paleo diet. Well, this isn't exactly paleo, except that the crust could get there, if one wanted to do so, but the entire dish is without gluten, and without other chemicals she has had allergies to. Plus, her husband is a fan of peaches and pies, so there is that. 

The crust is made using coconut flour (yes, there are recipes which use it as the primary flour!), shortening (in this case, butter, so, not exactly paleo, but ultra nibble-worthy, so I made two crusts & popped one in the freezer for later in the week), and eggs (with a little honey, just for the heck of it, but that's not essential to the structure). In essence, it's a pre-baked cookie crust.

The filling is a bigger project. I made a peach curd from peach nectar cooked way down, plus some flash-frozen peaches (thawed and pureed), some egg yolks, and a great honkin' amount of sugar… hey, it's a birthday pie! It's supposed to be decadent!

It was topped with more raw peaches steeped overnight in lime juice, then drained and coated with honey, and, finally, decorated with my favorite stabilized whipped cream topping. One could, I suppose, make it a peach meringue pie if one wanted, since the curd uses yolks and not the albumen, but I'm reserving the egg whites for next week's birthday chocolate sponge cake. Whippy cream it is, this time.

I made a double batch of everything, though, so one went home with the birthday girl, and the other is going on the table Friday evening for our weekly supper. I recommend you do the same, just because.

Coconut flour pie crust (single crust)

Ingredients: 

1/2 cup butter or coconut oil, melted 

2 large eggs

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons honey (optional if this crust is for a savory pie)

3/4 cup coconut flour 

Directions: 

Set rack in oven to near the bottom. Preheat oven to 400º F.

Heavily grease a 9" pie pan. 

In a medium microwave-safe bowl, heat the butter or coconut oil at low power until almost completely melted (about 1 minute. If it's not near melting point, continue to heat in 20-second increments until all but a few lumps of solid remain. Remove from the microwave and allow the solids to gradually melt, and the shortening to cool slightly. 

Add eggs, salt, and honey and thoroughly mix. Add coconut flour and stir until dough holds together. 

 

Gather dough into a ball and pat into greased 9" pie pan, and prick the dough with a fork. 

Bake 8-10 minutes, or until lightly browned. Allow to cool before filling. 

And this is my latest choice for filling:

Peach Curd 

Ingredients: 

4 egg yolks

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 cup fresh peach puree (or frozen, thawed)*

1 Tablespoon lime juice (or lemon, if you must)

6 Tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Directions: 

In a medium saucepan over medium heat, beat yolks with sugar, peach purée and lime juice. Simmer, stirring constantly, until it becomes thickened. 

Remove from heat, begin whisking in butter a few small pieces at a time. Stir in vanilla, then strain curd through a fine sieve. 

Pour into pre-baked cookie-type (sweet) pie shell or tart shells. Or, refrigerate it in a covered container and later you can spread it on your waffles, toast, etc. 

 *I actually started with a liter of high-quality peach nectar, and set it to simmer until it reduced to just over 1 1/2 cups (it took about 90 minutes on medium-low heat), and, since I was doubling the recipe, filled in by running a handful of frozen peaches (after thawing) through the food processor. But that's because I had time and curiosity. Using fresh or thawed peaches, you're likely to have a brighter color to the puree. The nectar darkened with some interesting near-caramelization as it cooked down. The flavor was darned spiffy.

It's too bad I don't have a good excuse to make a dozen of these for the family…just so I can keep licking the bowls, if nothing more.