Gluten-Free, Eggless Banana Bread

A gluten-free banana bread with the goodness of whole grain flours.

This Gluten-Free Eggless Banana Bread is made with my very first, homemade gluten-free flour blend. I’m not gluten-free 100 per cent of the time but ever so often, I like to eat a cake, a flatbread, bread or pancake that is satisfying yet light on the tummy. Very often, I’ve found gluten-free flour blends to be merely a combination of starches like tapioca, potato and rice flours; there’s hardly any nutrition there. My gluten-free flour blend combines starchy flours with nutrition-dense whole grain flours. Sorghum, amaranth and gluten-free oat flours enrich my gluten-free eggless banana bread.

To make this flour blend, I went with the thumb rule of using 70 per cent whole grain flours – a mix of heavy and medium flours with 30 per cent starchy flours – to help bind the bread, give it airiness and reduce the density of the crumb. This blend worked well with this particular gluten and egg free banana bread recipe. Muffins and pancakes I’m confident will also turn out well. I would love to try a pound cake or a genoise but I will probably need to swap some of the whole grain flours for more tapioca, cornflour and/or potato flour.

Getting back to our gluten free eggless banana bread; the list of ingredients includes all the usual staples – brown sugar, bananas of course, yoghurt and coconut oil to lend richness and moisture to the crumb. Since most gluten-free, whole grain flours are thirsty by nature, I amped up the liquid elements and threw in all of 4-5 bananas.

Now I have a thing for banana bread; you can see for yourself from the banana bread recipes on this site. Baked in a jiffy, it makes an easy breakfast option and a great mid morning or evening snack. And if the snack can be healthy and easy to digest, more’s the happiness from eating it.

You’ll notice that the bread has both baking powder and soda bicarb. It may sound like a lot of leavening but trust me,it is required for added lift and to counteract some of that denseness of whole grain flours. Soda bicarb is alkaline and reacts with acidic substances (in this case yoghurt and brown sugar) to create carbon dioxide which helps the bread rise. Too much soda bicarb can leave an unpleasant metallic aftertaste. So baking powder comes in handy here; composed of cream of tartar, soda bicarb and cornflour, it gives the bread a more controlled and sustained rise. This way, the bread rises beautifully – helped in the first stage of baking by the effervescence of soda bicarb reacting with yoghurt and later through the remaining 40 minutes with the slow and steady action of baking powder.

Since this is an eggless banana bread, I used powdered flax seeds soaked in warm water to mimic the egg and help hold the bread together. 1 tablespoon of flax seed powder soaked in 3 tablespoons of warm water is equivalent to 1 egg. This recipe has 2 ½ tbsps of flax seed powder (too much flax can cause gumminess and egg to flax substitution works best when limited to 2-egg recipes). The bananas here also help in binding the gluten-free flours.

That’s the science behind it but otherwise, this gluten-free, eggless banana bread is very forgiving and simple to bake. You can bake this in muffin tins as well if you like. Add walnuts or dried berries to jazz it up and add some bite. I had dried blueberries on hand which I mixed into the batter at the very end. Remember not to overmix the batter since it will deflate the air built up by the soda bicarb. Also, be patient and let the batter rest in the loaf pan for 10 minutes before popping it into the oven, to allow the flours to hydrate properly.

I’ve a long way to go to master gluten-free baking but I can safely say that this recipe is a steady, solid step in that direction. Find the recipe to my whole grain gluten-free flour blend here.