Chickpea Flour Roasted Red Pepper Loaf

This is a fully grain-free, low-fat, robot-friendly loaf, that is still nice and sliceable and portable. Perfect for a picnic, or (my favorite) topped with a thick slice of tomato and an over-medium egg for breakfast in the morning.

Bits:

Dry
- 1+ Tbsp mustard seeds (and optionally a little oil for frying)
- 200 g chickpea flour
- 2 Tbsp corn flour (it’s finer than corn meal, but coarser than corn starch)
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp curry powder
- 1/2 tsp berbere spice mix (optional, but recommended if you can find it. I put it in everything.)
- 1/4 tsp turmeric powder
- 1/2 tsp cumin powder
- 1/2 tsp zatar
- ~1 Tbsp black and white sesame seeds
Wet
- 5 roasted red peppers (from a jar. I think this is about 200 g)
- 175 g carrots
- 1/4 cup / 70 g roasted mashed yam/winter squash/pumpkin
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup Greek yogurt (I used nonfat)
- 1-2 Tbsp date syrup (about 20-40 g)
- 1 Tbsp lemon juice

Algorithm:

Heat oven to 300F. Line a baking sheet with parchment and lay roasted red peppers flat on the parchment. Optionally, blot them dry with a paper towel. Put the tray in the oven to dry out the peppers while you prep the other ingredients, about 20 minutes.
Line a 9”x5” standard size loaf pan with parchment paper. Lightly grease paper with butter.
Peel and grate the carrots. Set aside.
Add about ¼ tsp – ½ tsp oil to a small frying pan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the mustard seeds. When the mustard seeds start popping, put a lid or plate over the top and move the pan off the heat.
Combine dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl (sift chickpea flour as it tends to clump!).
Add wet ingredients except the roasted red peppers and carrots to a small mixing bowl and stir until pretty much smooth.
Take roasted red peppers out of the oven. Chop into roughly ¾” square bits. Set aside. Turn the oven heat up to 350F.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients except the carrots and roasted red peppers.. Fold with rubber spatula until almost combined.
Gently stir the carrots and roasted red peppers into the mixture until just combined.
The mixture will be thick, more like a rough cookie dough, than a runny batter. Smooth the mixture into the prepared bread pan and sprinkle sesame seeds on top.
Bake 45-55 minutes until a toothpick inserted in center comes out *almost* clean. Check after 20 minutes and put a foil hat over the top when it starts to look darker on top.
Enjoy warm or at room temperature. Wrap any leftovers tightly in plastic wrap and store in the fridge for up to a week.

Banana Bread Recipe for COVID

Ingredients:

Vegan butter or coconut oil for greasing
10 oz flour, plus extra for dusting
5.25 oz sugar (vegan)
¾ tsp salt
¾ tsp baking soda
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp ground cloves
4 large peeled overripe bananas (about 1 ¾ cups)
6 Tbsp / ¾ stick vegan butter (such as Earth Balance) or coconut oil, melted and cooled
¼ cup vegan yogurt
¼ cup vegan sour cream
2 Tbsp ground flaxseed, mixed with 2 Tbsp cool water
1 tsp vanilla
¾ cups chocolate chips (vegan)

Method:

Preheat oven to 350F. Your heating bill is already sky high from having to heat the whole house all day every day while you work hunched over your computer at your desk wrapped in a blanket on weekdays, and while you sit hunched over the news on your tablet wrapped in a blanket while slowly rocking back and forth on weekends, so the inefficiency of warming up a big oven to bake a single little loaf of banana bread won’t even register.
Use vegan butter or coconut oil to grease a 9”x5”x3” loaf tin.
Keep thinking that Americans don’t call it a tin, but loaf “pan” just sounds wrong now, especially after having binge-watched every season of The Great British Bake Off (all the ones they released in America, anyway). Dust with flour and tap out the excess.
In a large mixing bowl, sift in 10 oz of flour, because you don’t measure flour in volume anymore, perish the thought. Since you’ve been doing a lot more cooking in the past year than you expected, naturally you now have a reliable kitchen scale and wonder how you ever survived without it.
Sift in the sugar, salt, baking soda, baking powder, and cloves, and stir to combine. Set aside.
In a medium mixing bowl, add the peeled bananas and mash with a fork. Mash, and mash, pulverize those suckers until they’re destroyed, until they’re nothing but an unrecognizable lumpy goo, just like 2020 pulverized your now gooey heart.
Realize you didn’t already melt and cool the butter, in fact you haven’t even gotten it out of the fridge yet, and kick yourself because you know about mise en place, and you’ve made this recipe a hundred times before, but you never remember to prep the butter ahead of time. But why should this time be any different. Put the butter in a dish in the microwave and nuke it until it’s melted. Probably didn’t need to microwave it for quite as long as you did, now it’s pretty hot. Set it aside, and try to remember it at the end when it’s hopefully a little cooler.
Add the vegan yogurt, sour cream, flax eggs… damn. Ok, grind up some flax seeds in the coffee grinder, measure out two tablespoons of meal, and combine with water. Stir for a minute, and wonder if it needs to sit and thicken for a while. It looks pretty thick, so it’s probably good enough. Add them to the bowl, along with the vanilla. Stir everything to combine.
Pour the wet ingredients into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Fold with a rubber spatula until just mixed. Suddenly remember the butter is still cooling on the counter, and pour it in now. No one will know. Mix to combine.
Stir in the chocolate chips. It’s been a rough year. There should be chocolate chips stirred into two, if not three, foods you consume daily. Pour some extra chocolate chips into your hand and eat them straight. You’ve survived this long, and you deserve some chocolate chips for your trouble.
With a spatula scrape the batter into the prepared baking tin. Bake for 45 to 50 minutes until a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center comes out clean. Set on the counter to cool for ten minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.
Wash your hands while counting to 20-mississippi for the 1000th time today. Carefully wrap the banana bread in plastic wrap and thank fuck for the one measley consolation that it’s still safe to give food to your family who only live ten minutes down the road, because it’s an excuse to see them in person even for just two minutes while wearing masks, standing six feet apart, outside in the cold, since you usually only see them on Zoom anymore and they might as well be living on the other side of the country, and you miss them in a long-distance way. Hope that a little loaf of banana bread can make their winter just slightly less dark and lonely, and feel a little better because you were still able to reach out and show them you care in a small way.
Go back home and do your dishes, because they haven’t been clean all at once since last March. Keep doing dishes, because they are somehow all dirty again now, all the time. Long for the day when the dishes will once again all be clean.

Fudgy Protein Brownies

Grain-free && Low-fat && Sugar-free

These brownies are kind of amazing, if I do say so myself. They are dense and fudgy, and they hit you in the face with deep chocolatey flavor (far from the cringe-inducing sweetness that hits you in the face with other desserts). The flavor is so intense without being overly sweet, I’ve actually been eating them with berries or other fruits on top or on the side; it’s the perfect desert when you need serious chocolate (see Figure 1 below).

Fig. 1 Fudgy Protein Brownie topped with some fresh Pacific Northwest blackberries.

And best of all, I can actually eat them! That means they’re grain-free, low-fat, and low “sugar”. The trick (in addition to my usual bag of tricks) is that they’re sweetened with erythritol, which is a sugar alcohol; it passes through your body with almost no effect. Just like a neutrino. So it tastes sweet, but has no calories and doesn’t raise your blood sugar (i.e. has no glycemic load). I’ve been reading up on erythritol, of course, to learn more about it and make sure it’s safe, particularly as it seems too good to be true. I will let you do your own research, but it seems like it *is* actually as good as it promises. The only potential ill effects I’ve read about is that in large quantities it can cause temporary stomach upset and digestive trouble because the erythritol molecules reach your intestines without having been broken down; however, in “reasonable quantities” (like when you substitute 1 to 1 for sugar), for most people there’s no trouble. Each of these brownies has just 3/4 of a tablespoon of erythritol, which is less than the amount sugar than you’d find in a regular brownie. I am the last one who would want more digestive trouble in my life, but even I seem to tolerate “reasonable quantities” of erythritol perfectly fine.

To make the deal even sweeter (figuratively, not literally) I’ve added some protein powder into the recipe. High protein, low fat, no glycemic load, tastes like dessert… I’ll be making these on repeat.

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Fudgy Protein Browines

Makes 16 brownies (one 8”x8” pan)

Nutritional Info:

Total: 20.5g fat, 98g protein
Per brownie: 1.3g fat, 6.1g protein

Bits:

Dry

1 cup (120g) chickpea flour
1 cup (90g) cocoa powder (non-alkalized)
¼ cup (4 Tbsp) plain protein powder (I like NorCal Organic Pea Protein Powder)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
1 ½ tsp salt
⅛ tsp cloves

Wet

90g egg whites (equivalent of 2 large eggs)
¾ tsp vanilla
¾ tsp hazelnut extract
¾ cup erythritol
425g (1 can) canned pumpkin
1+ Tbsp water

Algorithm

Line an 8” square baking pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350°F.
Sift together dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
Mix wet ingredients together in a medium mixing bowl; stir until smooth and fully blended.
Pour wet ingredients into dry and stir together with a spatula until fully blended and no dry pockets remain.
Spread batter evenly in bottom of parchment-lined pan. The batter will be thick; smooth with a spatula.
Bake for 30-35 minutes until the middle is firm starts to look dry (a toothpick inserted in the center may not come out clean). Transfer pan to a wire rack and let cool completely before removing and slicing.

Chickpea Flour Dutch Baby Pancake

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Grain-free && Very low fat && Low sugar && 30 minutes or less

Need a delicious breakfast that won’t take all morning to make? I got ya covered!

The pancake obsession continues! In this installment, we make a single gigantic pan-sized pancake, which can provide a fun change-up from having many smaller buttermilk pancakes, for example. If you haven’t had a dutch baby before, I’d describe it as the cousin of a traditional pancake, but with a texture and taste that’s a bit more reminiscent of custard than bread. And, unlike smaller pancakes that must be made and flipped in many batches, requiring you to stand at the stove and pay attention for quite some time, this is a simple batter that comes together in one bowl, is poured into a large pan, and bakes in the oven for 15-20 minutes, during which time you can kick back and sip your morning coffee until it’s done.

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If you have had a dutch baby before, I will note that the product of this recipe won’t puff quite as much as a dutch baby made with traditional ingredients, but it will still taste just as custard-y and delicious.

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Chickpea Flour Dutch Baby Pancake

Makes one 12″ dutch baby pancake.

Special equipment: 12″ cast iron or stainless steel (oven-proof) frying pan. (Or use a 10″ skillet and one greased 8 oz ramekin)

Bits:

135g (1/2 cup + 1 Tbsp egg whites (equivalent of 3 whole eggs)
40g (2 Tbsp) roasted yam flesh / canned pumpkin
1 cup low-fat / non-fat milk
120g (1 cup) chickpea flour
1/2 tsp fine-grain salt
1 1/4 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp white sugar (or coconut sugar)
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp reduced fat butter for greasing (note: this adds less than 0.75 grams of fat per serving, and is pretty essential to preventing the dutch baby from sticking to the pan!)
Optional: fresh berries, date syrup, maple syrup, or a dusting of cinnamon and sugar, for topping

Algorithm:

Put a 12″ oven-proof frying pan in the oven, and preheat the oven with the pan in it to 450ºF.
While the oven is heating, in a medium mixing bowl, combine egg whites and yam (or canned pumpkin). If you’re using roasted yam flesh, for a more homogeneous consistency in your pancake, blend the egg and yam with an immersion blender until smooth. If you’re using canned pumpkin, just whisk with a fork until egg and pumpkin are combined.
Add chickpea flour to egg mixture and whisk with a fork until well combined. Add remaining ingredients except the reduced fat butter, and stir until well combined. You should have a thin, smooth batter.
When the oven has come up to temperature, remove the pan from the oven (be sure to use an oven mitt!). Drop in the butter, and swirl to evenly coat the pan. As soon as the pan is coated, quickly pour in the pancake batter, and place the pan back in the oven.
Bake for 15 minutes, until puffed and golden brown. Cut into wedges, top with fresh cut fruit, syrup, or a dusting of cinnamon and sugar, as desired. Enjoy!

Parsnip Date Hazelnut Chickpea Flour Loaf

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Grain-free && Very low fat && Slightly and naturally sweetened

This quick loaf coffee cake is perfect with a cup of tea or coffee. But, parsnips in a coffee cake you may ask? To which I’d reply, sure, it’s no stranger than putting carrots in a cake, which many would argue is much more delicious than strange. Parsnips are just another root vegetable, and they’re even carrot shaped, if that helps to put you more at ease. While maybe not be quite as sweet as carrots, they have a little more of an earthy, and almost creamy, flavor that’s hard to describe; well worth a try. Parsnips really have their heyday in fall when everyone starts to get excited about root vegetables, but like carrots, they seem to be available and delicious year round.

Made with 100% chickpea flour, it’s totally grain-free, and the only fat comes from the chickpea flour. It’s also sweetened only with a little bit of date syrup, making it pretty guilt-free for breakfast, brunch, lunch, tea, or dessert… you might even be able to pass it off as a dinner item; after all, chickpea flour is high in protein and parsnips are a vegetable. I say go for it!

For this loaf I recommend using a store-bought date syrup like The Date Lady‘s, which seems to be have a somewhat greater concentration of sweetness than the home-made stuff I’ve posted about (see my recipe for 110010 Birthday Cake for how to make your own date syrup. As the store-bought kind seems to be darker and a little sweeter, I have my suspicion that after blending the dates and water to make syrup, it’s probably cooked down a little to concentrate it; I need to do an experiment to check my hypothesis, and will be sure to report back when I do. But unless you have time to do the experiment yourself, try to go with store-bought.)

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Parsnip Date Hazelnut Chickpea Flour Loaf

30 minutes prep time, 45-55 minutes bake time

Makes 1 9″x5″ standard-sized loaf

Bits:

Dry:

150 g chickpea flour
1 tsp baking soda
¾ tsp salt
1 ½ tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 tsp ground fenugreek seed

Wet:

200 g grated parsnips (start with about 300 g / 2 large parsnips, then peel and grate to get 200 g)
¼ cup (70g) roasted mashed garnet yam (or butternut squash)
3 Tbsp (50 g) egg whites
½ cup (125 g) nonfat greek yogurt
1 Tbsp nonfat milk
2 Tbsp (40 g) date syrup
1 Tbsp lemon juice
¼ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp hazelnut extract (or omit and increase vanilla extract to ½ tsp)
¼ tsp almond extract

Algorithm:

Line a 9”x5” standard size loaf pan with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 350ºF.
Combine dry ingredients in medium mixing bowl (sift chickpea flour as it tends to clump).
Grate parsnips, if not already grated, and measure out 200 g. Set aside.
Add wet ingredients except the parsnips in small mixing bowl and stir until pretty much smooth.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Fold with rubber spatula until almost combined.
Add the parsnips to the batter and fold until combined.
Bake 45-55 minutes until a toothpick inserted in center comes out *almost* clean. Check after 20 minutes and put a foil hat over the top to prevent dark spots.
Be a boring grown-up and clean up your mess while the loaf bakes.
Let cool in the pan for 15 minutes. Remove the loaf from the pan, unstick the parchment, and let cool completely on a wire rack (best if you can leave it for at least 45 minutes to an hour, if not longer) before wrapping it up and putting it away).

Keeps for 2 weeks tightly wrapped in plastic in the fridge. Also freezes fairly well, but texture may suffer a little.

Chickpea Flour Flat Bread (+Caprese Sandwich)

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Very low fat && Grain-free && Vegan option

Giving up grains does not have to mean giving up bread! At least, if your definition of bread is a little flexible. I can’t say I have a recipe for sourdough or a nice crusty french baguette that will fool you into thinking you’re eating regular wheat flour bread, but this chickpea flour bread still unmistakably bready, and versatile enough to fill in just about wherever you need it. It’s light enough to use for a sandwich, and perfect for topping with chutneys or spreads and dipping into soups. My partner (human, with no dietary restrictions) isn’t really a fan of beans (I still don’t know how that’s possible), but he voluntarily gave this bread a taste; he said it’s “passable” and he’d eat it without complaint if served to him… coming from him, that’s a big success!

A couple of the keys to making this recipe work so well are the milk and the roasted yam (always!). You can still make bread if you use water instead of milk and omit the yam, but the bread will be a bit more dry and will taste more reminiscent of beans, so I recommend using milk and yam if at all possible. At this point I’ve just been keeping some roasted yam in my fridge at the ready at all times, since it’s so useful in baking with 100% chickpea flour. It’s super convenient to have handy whenever the need to bake strikes me, and it’s also tasty on its own, mixed into some dal, or as a side in a larger meal if I find I have extra leftover.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Chickpea flour flat bread with “spicy red pepper jelly” from my local deli

Lately I’ve been craving a good savory, juicy sandwich (which is a little weird because I’m not normally much of a sandwich person), so I used the flat bread recipe below to build a reasonable facsimile of a caprese sandwich (see further below): tomatoes, basil, strained low fat cottage cheese (in place of the fresh mozzarella), and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, plus a extra sprinkle of salt and pepper for good measure. In my pre-cyborg days when I tolerated fat better but not at all tomatoes, I’d make myself caprese salads and sandwiches with fresh mozzarella but subbing thick slices of roasted beet for the tomato; it’s not exactly the same, but it’s quite delicious in its own right. Try it out if you can’t have tomatoes, or if you want a new spin on a classic caprese.

I’m hoping to develop a grain-free yeasted loaf bread recipe, and I think I’m close to having a 100% chickpea flour quick-bread that could be sliced and used like sandwich bread too. Stay tuned!

Chickpea Flour Flat Bread

Makes six 4″x 4″ “slices”, or two large naan-style flat breads

Note: About 1h 30 mins total time, including 1 hour rise time.

Bits:

1 cup nonfat milk, warmed to about 110ºF (warm to the touch, but not hot; I microwaved a cup of cold milk from the fridge for about 40 seconds) (Substitute plant-based milk for vegan option)
½ tsp sugar
1 tsp (half packet) active dry yeast
270 g (2 ¼ cups) chickpea flour
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground cumin
90 g (about ½ cup) roasted, mashed yam (optional, but recommended)

Algorithm:

In a small bowl, combine milk, sugar, and yeast. Set aside for 10 minutes for the yeast to wake up. If using water instead of milk, you should see some foam on the surface, but foam will be harder to see if using milk.

Sift the chickpea flour into a medium mixing bowl. Add the salt and cumin, and mix through. Pour in the milk-yeast mixture and add the mashed roasted yam into the chickpea flour and stir gently by hand until you get a very wet dough.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set aside in a warm spot for 1 hour; the dough will rise a bit, but not quite double in volume.

Put a large baking sheet into the oven and preheat the oven to 425ºF.

Tear off a large piece of parchment paper about the size of your baking sheet and set it on the counter. Take a large pinch or two of chickpea flour and rub it around the surface of the parchment paper; a very fine layer should stick; discard excess flour.

For “sandwich bread” squares, pictured above, scoop the dough out onto the parchment. With a rubber spatula, spread the dough out into a large thin rectangle, about 8″ x 12″ and 1/4″ thick. For large naan-style flat breads, scoop the dough into two equal mounds on the parchment paper. With a rubber spatula, spread the dough out into ovals about a 1/2″ thick.

When the oven is done heating to 425ºF, remove the baking sheet, slide the parchment with the dough on it onto the sheet, and place back in the oven. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, until top is fully set, but don’t let it brown. Remove from oven and let cool on the hot baking sheet for 10 minutes. For sandwich bread, slice into six equal 4″x4″ squares (and slice off any rough edges, if you’d like). Top as desired, and enjoy!

110010 Birthday Cake

Grain-free && Refined-sugar-free && Soy-free && Dairy-free && Egg-free

(+ Nut-free Option + Vegan Option)

This cake was something I made for a (human) friend’s birthday; she has some stringent dietary restrictions and was lamenting several weeks ago over not having had the simple pleasure of biting into a soft crumbly piece of cake in years. Since her birthday was coming up, I thought I could probably figure out how to make a tasty chocolate cake that fit with her restrictions: no grains (and no chickpea flour!), no soy, no refined sugar, no dairy, and no eggs. Even though the fat content was way too high to be robot-compatible, I knew making up the recipe would be to be a fun challenge for me, and the end result was (I think) a sweet surprise for her.

I made several test cakes before arriving at the recipe below. (Thanks to all my guinea pig taste-testers!) I still want to iterate on this recipe to make it more user friendly… I know that idle cyborgs with an inexplicable penchant for baking even incompatible cakes (*ahem*) are probably the only ones who just happen to have both lentil flour and coconut flour just sitting around in their cupboards. Hopefully recipe simplifications will be forthcoming, but for now it is what it is. I suggest some substitutions for some of the more obscure ingredients in the list below that I suspect will work fine, but they are untested suggestions, as yet. (But then, where’s the fun in baking if there’s no risk?)

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110010 Birthday Cake

Makes one 8″ or 9″ double-layer cake

Bits:

Date Syrup (if not using store bought. Triple recipe and use in place of honey to make cake fully vegan — untested but I think it would work, and sounds tasty.)

200 g pitted dates
1 ½ cups + 1 Tbsp boiling water

Cake Dry Ingredients

320 g lentil flour (substitute chickpea flour if you can eat chickpeas)
80 g coconut flour
80 g hazelnut flour (store bought, or grind whole hazelnuts in a food processor or spice grinder; use 80 g additional coconut flour to make nut-free — untested but I think it’d work.)
96 g (1 cup) non-alkalized (not Dutch-processed) cocoa powder
2 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Cake Wet Ingredients

150 g (2/3 cup) coconut oil + extra for greasing
341 g (1 cup) honey
1 can full-fat coconut milk
½ cup date syrup (store bought or homemade from ingredients above)
¼ cup water
2 tsp vanilla extract

Frosting Ingredients (note: I made 2/3 this much to leave the sides of the cake “naked”. Make the below amount if you want to frost the sides.)

144 g (1 ½ cups) cocoa powder
1 cup + 1 Tbsp (2 sticks + 1 Tbsp) Soy-Free Earth Balance vegan butter, softened
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
256 g (3/4 cup) honey
1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp date syrup (store bought or homemade from ingredients above)

Algorithm:

Make the date syrup (if not using store-bought): Bring water to a boil, and pour over pitted dates. Let sit at least 15 minutes. Blend soaked dates with their soaking water, preferably in a high-speed blender, until you have a smooth paste. You should end up with a bit more than a cup.

Cake Prep: While the dates are soaking, grease either two 8″ or two 9″ cake pans with coconut oil. (I baked cakes of both sizes with success; the 8″ version turns out quite tall and is what is pictured above. Next time if I make two layers, I’d probably opt for 9″ rounds.) Preheat the oven to about 325 F. Take the butter for the frosting out of the fridge, if you plan to frost the cake soon after it cools.

Make the Cake: Sift the dry ingredients into a large mixing bowl. Be sure to sift the hazelnut flour, if you’re grinding your own in a food processor or spice grinder.

Melt the coconut oil just to the point that it all becomes liquid, and put it in a medium mixing bowl. Add the remaining cake wet ingredients, and stir to combine. If ingredients don’t combine smoothly when stirring by hand, get out the hand mixer and mix until smooth.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until just combined. Divide the batter evenly between the two greased cake pans. Drop each pan about 50 times from a height of about 3″ above your counter top to get the big air bubbles out of the batter.

Bake the cakes for 40 minutes, give or take a few minutes, rotating once half way through. Cake is done when a toothpick poked into the center just comes out clean (keep a close watch and be careful not to over-bake!). Cool the cakes for 15 minutes in the pans, then turn out onto a rack to cool completely.

Make the frosting: Add frosting ingredients in a deep mixing bowl, and blend with a hand mixer until smooth.

Frost the cake: Frost the top surface of the bottom layer cake and put into the fridge for 15 minutes to set. Remove from fridge, set the remaining cake layer on top, and frost all around. This frosting stiffens up well if cool enough, and would be suitable for piping if you have the piping bags, tips, energy, and inclination.

Robot-Compatible Chickpea Flour Banana Bread

Grain-free && Very Low Fat

Beep bop boop. Banana bread ready for ingest.

I developed this recipe to be grain-free, almost-non-fat (the only fat comes from the natural fat in the chickpea flour), and only lightly sweetened, in order to be compatible with my many dietary restrictions. The challenge, after taking grains, fat, and most of the sugar out of a baked good, is ending up with something that doesn’t taste like cardboard.

One (perhaps surprising) trick I learned through trial and error when baking with chickpea flour is that including some roasted mashed sweet potato helps keep the final product moist (though too much and it can become stodgy), while tempering the beany flavor that can sometimes come through with chickpea flour. The second trick I learned is specific to banana bread (thanks to the Banana Bread recipe on Serious Eats, which I recommend for humans with fewer dietary restrictions!): a banana’s characteristic flavor comes from a chemical compound called eugenol, which is also found in clove and nutmeg. So including those spices in banana bread actually amps up the banana flavor and the flavor of the spices themselves conveniently fade in into the background!

The result is, at least to me, a surprisingly tasty, moist and crumbly, satisfying substitute for a traditional banana bread. If you can handle it, I’m sure it’d be even better with lightly toasted pecans and/or chocolate chips mixed it. Otherwise, this is probably the healthiest banana bread you’ll actually enjoy eating!

(Helpful tip, if you don’t already know: If those bananas sitting on your kitchen counter start to get riper than you like to eat fresh, throw them straight into the freezer! They’ll keep just fine, frozen in the peel, until you’re ready to thaw them out and use them to make this banana bread!)

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Makes one 9″x5″ loaf

Prep time: 30 minutes, Bake time: 1 hour

Bits:

– Dry:

1 1/4 cups (172 g) chickpea flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pumpkin pie spice (or 1/8 tsp nutmeg, 1/8 tsp cinnamon)
1/4 tsp cloves

– Wet

12 oz (340 g) peeled VERY ripe bananas (about 4 medium; from frozen is fine)
2 Tbsp (41 g) roasted mashed garnet yam
2 Tbsp (30 g) egg whites
1/4 cup (75 g) nonfat greek yogurt
1 Tbsp (20 g) date syrup (I use The Date Lady‘s)
1 Tbsp (17 g) lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Algorithm:

Preheat oven to 350F. Line a 9”x5” loaf pan with parchment paper.
Sift chickpea flour into a large mixing bowl (don’t skip the sifting, chickpea flour tends to clump!). Add remaining dry ingredients and stir to combine.
Measure out and mash ripe bananas in a medium mixing bowl. Mash in the yam, stir until mostly homogeneous.
Combine wet ingredients except the yam and banana in small mixing bowl and stir with a hand mixer or whisk until pretty much smooth. Add the mashed banana and yam and stir to combine.
Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Fold/stir until combined.
Bake ~60 minutes. A wood skewer / toothpick inserted into the bread where it splits WILL NOT come out clean; it should have some wet crumbs stuck to it. Check after 20 minutes and put a foil hat over the top of the loaf if the top is starting to develop dark spots.
Remove from oven and let cool fully in loaf pan. Remove and slice only when cool!