Banana Chocolate Chip Bread, Take 2

For Attempt #2 I chose to reference a recipe from My Healthy Happy Home. The verdict: I should probably focus on the GF part and stay away from other complications such as also being vegan (i.e., Attempt #1) or low fat (i.e., this one) since I’m currently more interested in taste than those things. So there will be another attempt!

This one was ok, or at least my friends were very polite about it, but again there were some issues and some potential culprits:

1) It wasn’t very sweet.
The recipe only calls for 1/3 c sugar (I used coconut sugar) so maybe that was it. Or it could be because of the communication breakdown with my fruit vendor – It was dark so I couldn’t really see. I asked for ripe bananas, and didn’t realize til I got home that they were still pretty green.

2) Still crumbly.
The recipe called for “baking mix”. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I used GF flour and added in 1tsp baking soda and 2tsp baking powder. Maybe that does not a baking mix make… Also the whole low-fat thing could have been at fault here, and the fact that their substitution for oil was apple sauce, but since I didn’t have any, my substation was to add a third banana.

Some thoughts: one of my best friends, who has been doing the whole gluten free thing for a while, said that xanthum gum and guar gum and all those other things that sort of sound scary are attempts to recreate the glutinous quality of regular flour, and that she just makes things that aren’t trying to be “regular” or whatever. I think that sounds like a good philosophy; that’s definitely how I think about fake other things like meat or cheese which is probably worse for you than the original. Unless you have an allergy I guess.

Anyway, next time I will be making a full fat, full animal product version that will hopefully help to isolate the issue.