Banana bread baking project

My next assignment was to bake any bread or pastry with a leavening agent.  This was after our class with one of my favorite bakers, Annie Moss, of Seastar Bakery, here in Portland, Or.  While I have been trying not to eat much gluten lately for my digestive condition, Annie also inspires me to experiment outside of that box with more uncommonly used whole grain flours, such as whole wheat pastry, kamut®, triticale, and Maris Widgeon, explaining that when we eat white flour we are basically eating “concentrated gluten.”  She encourages sourcing locally, so that we can help to build and support a thriving local food system which includes a diversity of healthful grains.  She recommends checking out  Green Willow Grains as well as Camas Country Mill.

This is Annie:

 

Annie describes baked goods as “delicious balloons inflated with delicious air.”  She describes how leavening agents are what fill up those balloons with air.  San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum’s website contains a neat little section on the science of cooking, and explains here how it works:

“baking powder and baking soda both produce carbon dioxide, which helps raise or “leaven” baked products … Baking soda works best in conjunction with an acidic ingredient … Recipes generally include just enough baking soda to balance the acidity in the batter … Baking powder contains both baking soda and a dry acidic ingredient.  Since it isn’t dependent on acid ingredients in the batter, it is used to add the extra leavening necessary to raise … recipes like banana bread which contain heavy ingredients, such as bananas and sometimes heavy grains like wheat germ or whole wheat flour”

I decided to pick a recipe that uses baking soda or powder rather than a quick yeast or sourdough starter, as a personal preference.  Also, I had been wanting to try out a recipe from local food-blogger, Dana Schultz, of Minimalist Baker, and thought that this would be a perfect time to do so.  I chose her One Bowl Gluten Free Banana Bread recipe to start with and decided to modify it to include some whole-grain action.

I’ll walk you through what I did:

First off, I gathered my mise-en-place:

3 ripe bananas

1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract

1 egg

3 Tbsp coconut oil, melted

1/4 cup organic cane sugar

1/4 cup packed organic brown sugar

2 Tbsp honey

3.5 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp sea salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

3/4 cup unsweetened almond (I added in some chocolate almond/coconut milk that I wanted to use up)

1 1/4 cup almond meal

3/4 cup of ww pastry flour

1/2 cup spelt flour

1 1/4 cup oats

Oh …  and 1 boyfriend sous-chef, Vin.  Thanks sweets!  😉

I sprayed my 9″x 5″ loaf pan with a simple spray-on coconut oil:

Then, preheated the oven to 350ºF.

I made up my own flour blend of ww pastry and spelt rather than going with the gluten free flour blend Dana recommends.  This again, was just to experiment with whole grains in my baking.  I know it is more common to omit the gluten from recipes rather than to add it in, but I wanted to give it a go since the rest of the recipe looked so good.

I made sure, as per Annie’s recommendation, to shake my flour level while measuring rather than to smash it down with the slide of my finger.  Remember, we are trying to trap air and decadent aromas!

My sous-chef, Vin, had already mashed the bananas for me, so I began to add the other ingredients into the same big mixing bowl:

It’s been stinking HOT in Portland lately, so this is how easy it was to achieve the melted coconut oil needed for the recipe:

After adding everything up to the almond milk (and my chocolate coconut/almond blend), I had Vin whisk the mixture until everything was well incorporated.

Then, we added the almond meal, whole-grain flour blend and oats.  I was careful to fold these in with as few strokes as possible so as to retain any trapped air and to not overwork the batter.

When everything was just combined, we poured the batter into our loaf pan:

I added a strip of sunflower seeds and maple syrup for a tasty garnish:

We baked the bread for 1 hour and 15 minutes as the recipe suggests, but it did have to go about 5 minutes past to achieve what Dana describes as “firm” and “crackly” and “golden brown on top.”  I also used the finger-test method that Annie taught us in class, feeling for any “hot lava” underneath the crust layer as a sign that our bread was not yet ready:

It’s DONE!

 

We let the loaf rest for 2o minutes and then we cut in!

 

Yum!!  This bread is glorious!  It is rich and hearty, and has so much banana flavor.  It tastes healthy, in a very GOOD way!  I definitely recommend you give this (and any of Dana’s recipes at Minimalist Baker) a try.

One thing I did notice about our loaf is that it stayed pretty moist, which while delicious, is also somewhat harder to slice and serve.  I spoke with my neighbor Jaimes, who works for Ken’s Artisan Bakery about this.  He asked if I was using any starches in my batter.  When I said no, he explained that the ingredients usually found in gluten-free flour blends, such as tapioca or potato starches, help to create a more delicate crumb.

Ahhh!  Thanks for the info, Jaimes!!  Maybe next time I will try Dana’s recipe AS-IS, just to see what a difference it makes.

Well, thank you for coming along on this baking journey with me!  I hope you learned a thing or two.  Also, feel free to share with me any tips and tricks that you may have for baking and beyond.  Until next time, happy cooking and eating y’all!!

xoxoxo

Portuguese Purslane Soup

As an assignment for one of my classes this term, we were asked to visit the farmer’s market to acquire something we hadn’t cooked with before.  I was excited about the assignment as I LOVE the farmer’s market …  any shape or size, I’m into it.

I wanted to visit my friend Rick of Abundant Fields Farm, so I chose to go to the Montavilla market, where I knew he would be.  I imagined that he’d have some cool new thing that I could try and ask him about.  To my dismay, all his veg looked familiar.  What?  No Spanish black radish or chrysanthemum leaves today, Rick?  Dang.

My Food Journey

This is where I am going to write the story of how I got to be where I’m at with food.  I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis at the age of 8, lived most of my adolescence in discomfort, experienced flare-ups of my condition while in undergrad, and put myself into remission with a vegetarian diet and drastic lifestyle change.  At that time, I was learning in school about some of the atrocities of our industrialized food system, namely the working and living conditions of people who help to harvest our food.  I couldn’t continue to support the practices I was learning about, and my body was asking for better quality food.  Luckily, I went to school in Santa Barbara, Ca, where there is a farmer’s market every day of the week.  It was there that I discovered the first food co-op and urban farm I would come to know.  This is where everything started to change . . .