Moist Gluten-Free Banana Bread

Buckwheat flour usually shows up in my kitchen as soba, or in the lacy galettes of Brittany, where nobody thinks of it as a substitute. It has a toasty, faintly nutty flavor that wheat flour can’t offer. When you combine it with melted butter and a spoonful of white miso, that flavor comes out tasting like a rich browned butter, without the extra step at the stove. That’s the reason it’s in this loaf, and the gluten-free part is just a bonus.

Savory miso in a sweet loaf may sound odd at first, but it does the job salt does in any good baked good, and a bit more. It balances out the brown sugar and ripe bananas while filling out the flavor profile with a rich, earthy umami. Instead of just tasting sweet, it adds depth behind the sweetness, like shading that turns a flat drawing into something with shape and dimension.

What comes out of the oven has a moist, tender crumb that holds together when you cut it, with the kind of soft weight you want slice that’s going to sit next to a cup of coffee in the morning.

Why This Recipe Works

• Buckwheat for flavor — Buckwheat’s toasty edge, melted butter, brown sugar, and the savory depth of white miso add up to something that tastes like browned butter and caramel.
• Miso balances the sweetness — The salt in white miso holds the brown sugar and bananas in check, while its earthy flavor rounds out the bananas, brown sugar, and buckwheat.
• Potato starch for a tender crumb — Buckwheat flour alone can bake up dense and dry. Potato starch swells and holds onto moisture as the loaf bakes, which softens the crumb and keeps it from drying out.
• No gluten, no overmixing worries — With no wheat flour in the batter, there’s no gluten to develop, so you don’t have to worry about over-mixing the batter and making it chewy.

Key Ingredients

• Buckwheat flour — Despite the name, buckwheat is a seed unrelated to wheat, and its flour brings a nutty, slightly buttery flavor. Light and dark varieties both work; dark buckwheat flour gives a more assertive flavor and a grayer crumb.
• Organic Miso White Miso — A mild fruity white miso adds savory depth while complementing the bananas.
• Potato starch — Look for potato starch, not potato flour. Cornstarch or tapioca starch will work in a pinch.
• Very ripe bananas — You want bananas with skins that have gone mostly brown. They’re sweeter, mash smoother, and give the loaf most of its moisture. Weigh them if you can, since banana sizes vary a lot.
• Cultured butter — Butter made from cream that’s been fermented before churning, which gives it a faint tang and a fuller butter flavor from the diacetyl the cultures produce. Regular unsalted butter will work fine if that’s all you have.
• Dark brown sugar — The extra molasses in dark brown sugar is what pushes the flavor toward caramelized bananas. Light brown or granulated sugar will work in a pinch.

How to Make Moist Gluten-Free Banana Bread

Mash and whisk the wet ingredients. I start by mashing the bananas in a large bowl with a whisk until they’re mostly smooth. Then the rest of the wet ingredients go in, and I whisk hard until the mixture is smooth and creamy and the miso has completely dissolved. If you’d rather not whisk by hand, a hand mixer or immersion blender gets you there in a few seconds.

Sift the dry ingredients and fold. In a second bowl, I sift the dry ingredients together and give them a whisk so the leavening is evenly distributed. Then the wet mixture gets poured into the dry, and I fold it together until there are no pockets of flour left. There’s no gluten here to toughen the loaf, so a few extra strokes won’t hurt.

Bake and cool. The batter goes into a parchment-lined loaf pan and bakes in the middle of a 350°F oven for 50 to 60 minutes. The top will crack and turn a deep brown, and the loaf is done when a skewer inserted near the center comes out with moist crumbs rather than wet batter. Once it’s out of the oven, it needs to cool completely in the pan before you lift it out and slice it. This helps hold in some of the moisture, keeping it from getting dry.

TIP: If you have an instant-read thermometer, aim for 200 to 205°F in the center. This is a much more reliable method of telling when your banana bread is done.

Serve This With

A thick slice with a pat of salted butter and a cup of black coffee is how I like to eat this in the morning. If you want to lean into the miso, spread on some sweet-salty honey-miso butter, which melts into the crumb and picks up where the loaf’s own miso leaves off. A handful of miso caramel nuts on the side adds a marvelous crunch and protein. For dessert, a warm slice with a scoop of miso ice cream and a drizzle of miso caramel sauce makes for a decadent ending for a dinner party.