Coconut Butter Bread

Makes 1 loaf

I’d been making bread with coconut flour but felt conflicted, knowing that it had a significant amount of fiber in it, which can be irritating to the gut. Also, I really don’t like cooking my nut flours. So I asked my wonderful GAPS practitioner, Sandy, and she recommended this great recipe from lovingourguts.com. It gives you the benefits of the fat with the fiber when using coconut butter. She informed me that baking soda is not acceptable on its own but should be okay when incorporated into recipes in small amounts. It has a much better consistency than the other bread I had tried. It works for sandwiches as well as burger buns and egg sandwiches. (I always double it!)

It’s best sliced and toasted

Ingredients

1 cup coconut butter (see below)
5 eggs, at room temperature
¼ cup coconut oil or pastured lard
½ teaspoon sea salt
¾ teaspoon baking soda

Directions

Preheat the oven to 300° F. Grease a 5 by 9-inch loaf pan and place the jar of coconut butter into a pan of simmering water to soften it. This will take about 10 to 20 minutes. Stir the coconut butter to make it consistent throughout. Put all of the ingredients into a bowl, and mix with a handheld blender. Be sure to blend enough so that there are no lumps at all. The consistency should be like cake batter. Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 40 to 50 minutes. Let it cool for 10 minutes. Store in the refrigerator. (Do not send this off to school right out of the oven in an airtight container. It may come back uneaten and moldy. Once it’s cooled in he refrigerator, though, it’s good to go.)

Variation: For cinnamon raisin bread, fold in 1 teaspoon cinnamon and ¼ cup raisins, pour into the loaf pan, and follow the instructions above.

Coconut Butter

Pour 4 cups unsweetened coconut flakes into a food processor or high-speed blender. Start by pulsing, scraping down the sides with a spatula. This will take 10 to 20 minutes to process (a food processor is faster than a blender). Store in a glass jar in the cupboard.

These recipes are from The Heal Your Gut Cookbook: Nutrient-Dense Recipes for Intestinal Health Using the GAPS Diet (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014), and are used with permission of the publisher. For more information, visit www.chelseagreen.com.

Check out other recipes from Hilary Boynton and Mary G. Brackett:

Preserved Lemons

Cauliflower “Couscous”

Moroccan Chicken