Gluten Free Banana Cardamom Bread

Photo by Steve Apps of The State Journal.

This bread is a cover model.  Seriously, it was all over the local paper on Friday.  

I had no idea when the article was going to be printed so I didn't get a chance to warn people to keep an eye out for it.  So in the ennui filled late hours of the afternoon when they were both probably hiding from work in separate break rooms both the fella and my friend Tim texted me nearly the same sarcastic message.  "There's a great article on going gluten free in the paper you should look at."  

And there I was in the paper.  Well not technically me, more like my bread.  Even Lindsay who wrote the article isn't sure why there are three pictures of bread and no pictures of me in  the print article.  I guess the bread was just more photogenic than me.  Le sigh.  Given how great the pictures of my baking came out I'm thrilled they got all that attention though.

This loaf doesn't technically fit in with the French Diet considering the higher GI flours and the bananas but for the weight maintenance phase it would be a nice breakfast bread.  The diet aside, this bread is surprisingly good,  I made it and even I was blown away.  

The fella had this great recipe for a banana cardamon loaf he used to make when we were first dating so when I needed an idea for another bread recipe I decided to use that recipe to reverse engineer it into a gluten free version.  And it worked out really nice.  Gluten free it isn't quite as fluffy but since it's a desserty bread it doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of it at all.  Smeared with a little honey the fella and I really enjoyed nibbling on it with Lindsay and her fella literally seconds after the photographer got done with it.  It smelled that good we couldn't resist any longer.

Gluten Free Banana Cardamom Bread

2/3 cup warm water (temperature around 110 is best)
1 teaspoon yeast
1 generous pinch of sugar

3 cups Bob Red Mill Baking and Biscuit Flour blend
1/2 cup ground flax seed
1 tablespoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons honey or agave nectar
2 very ripe bananas well mashed

arrowroot or tapioca starch to flour work surfaces
1 teaspoon sesame seeds

Put the warm water in a small bowl.  Whisk in the yeast and sugar and let stand about 10 minutes or until it turns bubbly.  If the water doesn't become frothy it means the yeast isn't active and you need new yeast or the water was too hot or cold to activate it so try again.

Stir together the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl.  When well combined add in the yeasty water, honey, and bananas.  Gradually incorporate the mix into a soft dough with a wooden spoon and your fingers, adding a little more water if necessary to get a dough like consistency that isn't too dry and crumbly. 

Dust a cutting board or very clean counter with arrowroot or tapioca starch (you don't want to add anymore flour to the dough, you want to use a sticky starch that won't dry out the bread for this purpose).  Knead the dough for a minute or so until it is sticky and well combined.  Return it to the bowl and cover with a damp dish towel to allow to rise for about 2 hours or until the dough has doubled in size.

After it has risen, remove the dough from the bowl back to the dusted work surface and divide into three equal pieces.  Roll each piece into a short fat oblong shape and braid the three together.  Place the dough on a greased baking sheet and loosely cover with plastic wrap.  Let stand until it rises a little bit again.

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Brush the dough with a bit of water and then sprinkle with sesame seeds.  Bake for 10 minutes then lower temperature of oven to 400 degrees.  Cook for a further 15 minutes or until the loaf is browned and sounds hollow when tapped.

This will be a very dense dessert like loaf of bread and is best served with a little honey or raspberry jam.  Store in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator. 

Look Ma My Bread is Famous

 Photo by Steve Apps of the State Journal.

The interview I did with my foodie friend Lindsay for the local newspaper here in Madison just went up today.  As you may know May is Gluten Free Awareness month so she talked to me and a couple other people in the Madison gluten free community about our experience of going without wheat.  And the most important part of the whole thing of course was the food. 

I cooked four different very photogenic loafs of bread that the paper's photographer did a great job of capturing.  I'll post the recipe for the banana cardamom bread I reverse engineered from the fella's favorite gluteny recipe next week.  The other three recipes are from some of my favorite gluten free bloggers so be sure to check those out in the article as well.

It was a fun experience.  Now that people know what I'm doing over here I better get back to some serious blogging.  But after all that baking I need some time off from making bread.  I'm all breaded out.

Coconut Flour Bread

This is literally the easiest bread recipe in existence.  The hardest part about it is finding the coconut flour to cook it with.  Coconut flour I must warn you is not cheap.  I think a pound was $12 at my local grocery store.  But it is worth it for the experience and to try a totally new flour.  Coconut flour is ridiculously high in fiber and about a 45 on the glycemic index so it is perfect for this diet.  I really enjoyed having a bread that was different than anything else I've ever baked, it's naturally sweet and has a crisp outside and tender chewy middle that makes it have the mouth feel of toast without actually requiring a toaster.

Actually a word of warning on that issue, unless you have a very narrow toaster, because this makes such a tiny loaf the bread, it will just fall in the toaster never to be heard from again.   So if you want it warm just stick it in a warm frying pan for a minute or so to get warm.  Another thing, grinding up unsweetened coconut you already have at home will not make coconut flour no matter how finely you grind it.  Believe me I've tried and I haven't figured out how to fake it with out lumpy horrible results so this is one case where I'm going to have to advise you to suck it up an pay full price at the store for it.  You won't be sorry you did. 

Coconut Flour Bread

6 eggs

1/2 cup melted coconut oil 

1 tablespoons agave nectar

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

3/4 cup coconut flour 

Mix all ingredients together and pour into a small buttered loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes. 

From the Nourishing Days blog.

Cranberry Flax Seed Breakfast Muffins

 

Until this weekend breakfast had me stymied.

Gluten free bread is tough enough to make on it's own and calls for all sorts of esoteric ingredients like xanthan  gum or tapioca starch.  Unfortunately those celiac friendly starches that mixed together in perfect combinations emulate the dreaded but nicely sticky gluten in wheat are insanely high on the GI index and therefore a Montignac  no no.  And all the recipes for low fat, high fiber breads that would be Montignac friendly were too whole wheat dependent to modify for the gluten free.

This just wouldn't do.  So I spent a week searching the internet and all the gluten free cookbooks I could find for a solution.  It didn't exist so I gave up on bread and thought about other tasty breakfast options, something that wouldn't need yeast and would still be tasty while still being really dense.  Enter muffins.  Gluten free muffins would be much more forgiving than bread.  So I combined my original Montignac bread recipe with a vegan sorghum flour fruit muffin and hoped for the best.

I took all the fatty ingredients and most of the sweetener out of this recipe from the Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen and started adding back liquid in the form of skim yogurt, hoping that the old vegan trick of using flax seed as a binder and egg substitute would work.  And it did!

If I hadn't just told you these were healthy you would never know it.  They made the house smell amazing and it took all the will power I had to wait until breakfast to try one.  That morning the fella and I sat with our muffins, wide eyed with the tastiness of my creation.  I was so excited to have one I got out of bed at 7AM on my day off to partake in one.  I'm that big of a food nerd.  But I was not disappointed, these heavy little fruit packed chewy muffins are worth getting up early for.  The only thing that will make these muffins any better is baking them with fresh blueberries once they are back in season.

I fear however that this muffin success has gone to my head, I now have the desire to do all sorts of other combinations with this basic recipe.  Ginger pear.  Fig lemon.  Now that I know it works the fella is going to have an endless array of breakfast muffins to look forward to.  The poor guy, he has such a tough life.

Cranberry Flax Seed Breakfast Muffins

2 cups sorghum flour

2 tablespoons arrowroot

1 1/ 2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

1 teaspoon xanthan gum

1/ 2 teaspoon salt

1/ 2 teaspoon cardamom

1/ 2 cup applesauce

1/ 4 cup agave nectar

3/ 4 cup yogurt

2 teaspoon vanilla

1 orange zested

2/ 3 scant cup fresh squeezed orange juice

1/ 2 cup flax meal

2 cups fresh cranberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Well oil a 12 cup muffin tin or line with paper muffin cups.

In a large bowl mix together well the sorghum flour, arrowroot, baking soda, cream of tartar, xanthan gum, salt and cardamom.

In a separate medium bowl whisk together the applesauce, agave nectar, yogurt, vanilla, orange zest, orange juice.  When combined stir in the flax meal and let mixture sit for a couple of minutes until the flax meal has thickened and absorbed some of the liquid. 

Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ones and mix together.  Add the cranberries and gently fold together.  The batter will be lumpy and thick, the consistency of a heavy banana bread or oatmeal, if it's too wet add a little flax meal, if too dry add a bit more orange juice.

Spoon the batter into the muffin tin, filling each cup to the top.  Bake for about 20 to 27 minutes or until slightly browned on the top and able to pass the tooth pick test.  Remove muffins from tin to cool completely.

Serve with a little sugar free jam and a small bowl of fat free yogurt with berries for a perfect low fat/high carb Montignac breakfast.

Modified and made Montignac friendly from a recipe at The Whole Life Nutrition Kitchen.

Flax Seed Foccacia

Someday soon when I have a couple seconds to breath I will tell you all about the fabulous weird wine and bizarre food party I hosted on Sunday. It was fabulous and oh so much fun. I adore my wine loving friends and spending the day in the kitchen dreaming up tasty culinary oddities with Jacob is my new favorite hobby. We did a lot of playing off each other to co-create yummies for this party. It was a lot of fun and it was all highly amusing.

This focaccia is what I made as a place to spread the very spicy and complex mustards that Jacob brought along homemade the night before. He posted the recipes for those on his blog (which you should be reading) and so here is the bread to go along with it.

They worked out really well together. The bread was just moist and hearty enough to be a perfect base for the mustard. I was surprised that it was so good for such an embarrassingly easy recipe, this is rarely the case for gluten free bread after all. This bread was also a nice place to spread cheese. Next time I may even try spreading it in a cookie sheet to make a thinner crisper bread that's more crostini like.

The wheat eaters at the party had no idea this was sans gluten and the plate of focaccia disappeared faster than you could say “mustard seed.” I'd say that counts as successful party food.

Flax Seed Foccacia

2 cups flax meal
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon sea salt

1 tablespoon agave nectar
5 eggs, whisked
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup olive oil

In a large bowl combine flax meal, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt.

In a smaller bowl, mix together agave, eggs, water and olive oil.

Stir wet ingredients into dry, mixing well, then allow to stand for 2-3 minutes so that batter thickens. Pour batter into a greased 11 by 7 or larger glass baking dish. Bake at 350° for 20 minutes or so until a knife comes out clean

Cool. Cut into squares. Slather in extremely spicy and delicious mustard a la Jacob.

Original recipe from Elana's Pantry.

Montignac Bread

Tomorrow night I'm having some friends over to share in the joy that is my obsessive cooking habit. Should be a great time. And to make sure I get to enjoy it I planned ahead and roasted the vegetables and garlic tonight so I'm not slaving away in the kitchen all evening tomorrow while everyone else gets into the wine. Added plus I even had good company to keep me from going crazy trying to figure out the recipes. I do enjoy some girl talk to pass the time so thanks for that you know who you are.

While the oven was on I also finally got around to making some acceptable bread for breakfast. We've been eating Kashi and soy milk all week because I just haven't had a spare moment to bake. And that's been about as delicious as chowing on whole grain wheat crumbs first thing after waking up.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day where bread is allowed so I'm planning on enjoying it from here on out. Hopefully this bread is as tasty as it smells unfortunately I can't tell you just yet because I would break all the rules eating bread at near midnight.

I can tell you it looks very yummy and is quite dense. So if nothing else it will do a very good job at filling us up until lunch comes around. And almost anything tastes fabulous with sugar free jam on it so I'm optimistic.

Montignac Bread

3 cups of stoneground wholegrain wheat flour
1 cup of rolled wholegrain wheat or oat flakes
1 cup of crushed oat kernels (I used flax seed)
3 teaspoons of baking powder (I substituted 3/4 tsp baking soda and 1 1/2 tsp cream of tarter)
1 teaspoon of salt
3 cups of milk (I used one cup plain yogurt and 2 of milk)

Preheat the oven for 390. Stir the dry ingredients thoroughly together in a large bowl. Add the milk and mix well. The dough should be moist. Pour the batter into a large bread pan and let it bake for about 55 minutes. This makes a very dense bread that will not rise much at all.

Original recipe from a message board I've since managed to lose.