Wow my first Nourishing traditions FAIL, and it’s something easy like banana bread! Not a great day. I baked two batches of banana bread and they both didn’t turn out. One was with sprouted wheat flour and one with whole wheat pastry flour that was soaked overnight. In each recipe I used the same quantities of ingredients and followed the recipe in the book exactly.
In the first batch, I baked both types of batter in the small loaves at 350 degrees. The outside cooked too much and the inside didn’t cook, so I cooked the larger loaves at 325 degrees. They turned out slightly better, but neither bread actually tasted very good.
I have used a great banana bread recipe (albeit with white flour and sugar) since I was a teenager (thanks mom!). I am known as an expert banana bread baker. My husband swoons at the mere mention of me baking banana bread. I think I’m going to modify that to the NT style and will post it here in the near future.
In the meantime, please enjoy my banana bread fail pictures, and know that experiments in my kitchen do not always work out! I am committed to share the good, the bad and the ugly with you guys, and here is the ugly!
{ 34 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve tried that recipe twice and failed both times. I too have a very non-NT recipe for banana bread that everyone loves. I look forward to hearing about a success in the future that I can try myself.
I, too, suffered from Banana Bread failure for many years. I then found a recipe from Cooking Light. It uses yogurt. I substitute with wholesome ingredients (including soaked flour, sucanat or honey crystals, pastured eggs, etc.) and even add ground flax seed. It works every time….really.
So sorry! If I were to try it again, I would experiment with the flour. WW pastry flour is low in gluten and may not have enough structure to support the bread. I would use 2/3 WW pastry flour and 1/3 WW bread flour (hard white wheat berries) the second time. This combination would increase the gluten preventing the sunken top. Any recipe calling for all-purpose flour using needs this conversion ratio. Also, if cookies turn out paper-thin flat, it is due to a low gluten content in your flour. If you buy flour and follow the recipe, then buy better flour (it’s the consist gluten content that you pay for). If you mill your own, then try mixing the higher and lower gluten berries to achieve the correct gluten needed for a recipe. Soft white wheat berries = ww pastry flour = low gluten. Hard white wheat and hard red wheat berries = ww bread flour = high gluten. Hard white wheat produces a bread with a soft light texture similar to white bread. Hard red wheat yields a bread with a dense texture associated with whole wheat breads.
By the way…crumble up the failed banana bread and save. Use like granola and mix in plain yogurt to serve. Yummy delicious.
It failed on me too. There’s got to be something wrong with that recipe! I didn’t try it twice. I was afraid to waste those precious ingredients!
I’m going to try to one with yogurt that Joann posted. I love the Cooking Light cookbooks if you substitute better ingredients.
Thanks for posting!
It’s not you, it’s the recipe. I’ve made this with similar results.I suspect there’s not enough leavening. It could also also benefit from more banana and/or sugar. Did you find too that this recipe makes 2 loaves, not 1 as printed in the book?
Kim, I’ve decided to click your donate button every time you make an NT stinker. It’s a bummer to spend money on wholesome ingredients and the recipe comes out badly. It’s fun to read your blog and see what works and what doesn’t!
I too spent time and precious ingredients for a failure of this recipe. I don’t think they tested this one in their kitchen before printing the Nourishing Traditions cookbook. However, I still ate it super thinly sliced and toasted, which still didn’t firm it up, but made it edible. I think new additions of the cookbook should eliminate or alter this recipe. Another thought came to me just now. Maybe this kind of thing really isn’t good for anyone! It really deters people from overdoing it on “sweet” things. If so, mission accomplished.
It failed for me as well. Every bread I tried failed, in which I used sprouted and/or soaked wheat
Jin… you are so funny, and nice! thank-you!
Yeah I am never thrilled when I experiment and things go wrong. At least my compost pile can be well fed though!
Usually I can tell when reading the recipe if it will be a ‘fail’ and then do things to prevent it. I guess I really should have bought the stoneware loaf pan this time, I bet that would have made a difference.
LunarChick… great idea…! I could make banana bread ‘croutons’ and put them in yogurt! You are amazing.
Thanks for the info on gluten, that is good for my learning. I think Bob’s Red Mill also sells wheat gluten that could be added to recipes like this. Maybe I will try that next time…
Lea… try my lemon bread recipe with sprouted wheat flour, it turned out well for me! That’s why I was doubly surprised about the banana bread. I am very excited about the sprouted flours.
We freeze our banana bread and slice it thin and it it right out of the freezer. Its especially yummy when its a littly dough-y in the middle, never tried it with the NT recipe though, so maybe its just all the white flour and sugar!
I tried the zucchini bread variation and ended up with nasty, flat zucchini bricks, burnt outside and raw inside, even though I cooked them in stoneware pans. I had two loaves as well, not one – way too much dough.
I have standard zucchini and banana bread recipes that I have used for years that work out great every time, too. It has to be the recipe.
Sorry about the banana bread failure (although if you hadn’t had a glitch I would have never learned about using the crumbs in yogurt, sounds wonderful). I have had a hard time with several baked items in Nourishing Traditions. I have however found a good banana bread recipe, I used the Healthy Banana Bread recipe from cheeseslave (http://www.cheeseslave.com/2009/04/15/healthy-banana-bread/) and just added some chopped crispy pecans to it. It is really wonderful.
idea for failed sweet/quick breads- bread pudding! So good! I just got a recipe off allrecipes.com that uses milk, eggs, vanilla, sugar (I use sucanat, but you don’t need much with sweet breads). I did this with my first NT muffins- so dry & tasteless but delicious broken up & made into bread pudding!
(and my attempt at NT banana bread failed also- though mine got overcooked & was not gooey, it was not tasty)
Another FAIL for me, too! I tried the cream cheese breakfast pastries today, and WOOF! The dough was crazy sticky and difficult to work with (I used fresh ground soft white wheat flour). Once I baked them, they spread out into squarish “patties’, not rolls. The flavor was bland, bland, bland.
I think these were supposed to be something like my Uncle Joe’s Hungarian rolls (which are also made from a cream cheese dough and have a sweetened nut filling), but they were not even close.
I tried chilling the dough after mixing, but it was still REALLY sticky. I worked with in on Super Parchment and I think it would have been even worse on a pastry cloth. Just be warned when you tackle these.
Some good news – I tried the waffle recipe yesterday, and although they did brown quite dark, they were reasonably tasty. The boys ate them with plenty of butter and maple syrup.
What we, and everyone else I know has found, is that the recipes in NT are scientific.
Hence the reason they are so bland, and often do not turn out well.
I have determined that NT is my sounding board, not my cookbook.
I used it to learn how to flip recipes in all my modern day cookbooks.
Wow, thanks for the bread pudding idea Lisa, and I agree with everyone else, it is definitely the recipe. However, I kept experimenting with it and came up with something I like. The only thing I’m still working on is not undercooking it. I always soak my flour (regular old whole wheat) 24 hours, and it rises very nicely. I get 2 large loaves. Using the NT banana bread recipe I change the maple syrup to 1 cup of honey or combination of honey and palm or date sugar, plus I use 4 bananas instead of only 2. Even my extended family likes it, and they all eat refined sugar.
Makes 2 large loaves:
I guess I am the only one that hasn’t had a problem with this banana bread. I have been making it for over a year and my family loves it. I’ve noticed on other websites that others can’t seem to get it to work either. I use Whole Wheat Pastry that has been soaked and it works every time. I follow the recipe as is in the book. I was wondering if it could be because my oven is pretty new and maybe has a more accurate temp. Who knows??
I have made a couple of beautiful moist banana cakes by doctoring this recipe. I increased the amount of bananas, butter and maple syrup and removed the pecans. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the amounts as I did it by feel and then tested it several times during baking to determine when to pull it out. I used Spelt flour and yoghurt.
Jo… this is great! The next time you make it, if you wouldn’t mind sharing your exact changes to make it into cake, I can update this post. Spelt is a good idea since it’s lighter.
Crystal… this is great I’m glad it worked out for you! I think you have the magic touch! The next time you make it if you wouldn’t mind seeing if you do something special that maybe is second nature to you and let us know. I can always update this post. thanks! Your oven may be it though, I didn’t think of that…
Could sprouted or soaked flour be the problem? The reason I ask is that today I tried to make my Dad’s fool-proof Swedish crepe recipe with sprouted rye flour instead of plain white flour. The batter mixed too thickly (normally should be the consistency of heavy cream), so I added a little more milk to thin it just a bit. Then when I tried to cook them, they took forever to heat through and would practically fall apart when I would try to flip them– no cohesiveness or chewiness like the regular recipe. I am a newbie to all this– does sprouting reduce the gluten content of the flour, or does rye just not work well outside of leavened bread recipes? Could the extra bit of milk have made that much difference?
I have a terrible time with several of the NT bread recipes like the banana bread and the muffins (AWFUL!), I do think it’s the recipes as I have compared with friends who’ve had similar issues. However, there are Sue Gregg’s cookbooks to the rescue! I don’t know if you have these books but they are awesome, totally nourishing and her bread recipes are fabulous.
Her website is here:
http://www.suegregg.com/
Hi Logan… the banana bread is the first recipe that I had a hard time with. You might try the Lemon Bread recipe… it turned out very good!
Hey Kim – sorry to hear about the sunken bread. I have been baking gluten free for about 2 years now, and almost all of my bread turns out that way unless I use a mix of flours, including brown rice flour, white rice flour, and tapioca starch. I also use more leavening and more fruit than recipes call for. What have you found so far with other modifications that other readers suggested?
Any chance the recipe could be posted anyway so could try it with Jennie’s changes/additions to the recipe? Thanks
Olivia… sure! I will try to get this out in the next couple days…
thanks..! I’m not giving up on this bread. I’m going to buy a stoneware loaf pan and try again. Perhaps I will also let the flour soak longer. I haven’t had a chance to try this recipe again yet… but I am going to make it work somehow! I also suspect my oven temp is off, so I’m going to check that out too before I try again.
Adding gluten sounds to me like adding bran or white flour; mixing a refined product with a wholesome one!
I have always (since sometime before 10 anyway) been extreme like this, which was likely annoying for my mother who ads bran and such, but Nourishing Traditions was a happy discovery for me. Since then i have noticed a sensitivity to gluten and have made a great many of these recipes gluten free (particularly the pancakes which have been a standard for years), all with success except this one! Your pictures actually look identical.
The post about it failing caught my eye, and so far NT has been the most successful collection of recipes for converting to gluten free flour. However i also substituted apple (cooked into sauce of banana consistency) for banana, which should have made it less goey not more, but it was hard to substitute exactly. I suspected a put too much in.
Maybe this recipe does work under certain conditions (or it probably wouldn’t have been included in the book) but is far more delicate than others, considering so many people have failures.
Thanks for the granola idea, do you dehydrate them a bit or something? I sliced it and cooked at a low temperature for a while trying to dry it out a bit, it ended up sort of burned and still not tasting good. Fortunately for everyone my brother-in-law loves burnt food so he ate it all.
The only other problem i’ve had was the raisin oat cookies, which spread out as described, something i hadn’t experienced before. But the dough did look exceptionally wet to me, but i stuck to the recipe and assumed she meant them to be lace cookies. Although they did taste really good i didn’t like them spreading so i added coconut flakes and arrowroot and that was much better.
Also macaroons stuck to the paper a bit, still delicious, but i think this is my paper, i always have this problem and dread recipes suggesting it. Otherwise it smokes, is there supposed to be a certain side up? We always just greased pans when i was a kid.
Also you can try buttering a stainless measuring cup, or other really small ‘pan’ and baking a little sample to see how it turns out. Cookies are great because you can see the results gradually and at least save part of the batch, but with batter bread you kind of have to leap!
I’ve learned to do this with gluten free baking in order to tell if i need more leavening or binding.
I usually make a half or quarter batch too if it’s easily divisible.
the sprouting definitely lessens the gluten, the reason it is more digestible, but also crumbly. Personally i find recipes work out better when soaked, but i don’t use sprouted flour for a variety of reasons. I think the important thing is that it soaks in a warm place, i’ve soaked it at times when hte temperature dips pretty low at night (wood stove heat, not constant all night, also i’ve done it a lot camping) and it didn’t work as well. Now i soak it in the morning to be sure it gets warmth all day and it’s ok if it’s chilled at night.
When you soak it the flour has time to soak up more of the moisture, you could try adding the extra milk when you soak it instead.
My sister and I have made this once each, and had fantastic success. The only thing I changed was to leave out the nuts so that my girls can take it to school. It was my first NT recipe and very happy with the results.
I think I did cook it a little longer, covering so that it didn’t burn while it finished baking.