Easy GAPS Pumpkin Bread with Coconut Flour

Yes, you can still make pumpkin bread while on the GAPS diet! You don’t even need special ingredients. This favorite fall treat comes together quickly and is also gluten free, grain free, and refined-sugar free. Delicious, easy and ready in an hour!

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Is there such a thing as “healthy pumpkin bread”? What about pumpkin bread on the GAPS diet? Gluten free pumpkin bread is all over now, thankfully, but what about grain free pumpkin bread? Or grain and nut free pumpkin bread?

Yes, it can be done!

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Sadly, most pumpkin breads are full of ingredients that aren’t exactly working for our benefit, including the gluten free ones. Flour, starch, and refined sugar are pretty normal ingredients. They are harsh on our guts, feed harmful bacteria, and don’t contribute to health.

In the grain fee world, a lot of recipes rely on nuts and starches. Those aren’t necessarily bad things! Even the more conventional pumpkin breads might be just fine in moderation, especially for someone in perfect health.

But what if you aren’t in perfect health? Or don’t feel great when eating the usual sort of pumpkin bread? Or what if you are following the GAPS diet or another gut healing plan?

The lack of treats, and baked goods in particular, holds a lot of people back from trying to get better. Or from sticking to their goals once they start. We like treats, or they wouldn’t be treats! We don’t want to feel deprived while trying to feel better!

Well, you can have some treats that aren’t so harsh on your gut and health. Even on the GAPS diet!

How to Make a Better Pumpkin Bread

The very best way to go about making pumpkin bread with coconut flour would be to freshly grind the coconut to make your flour and cook a fresh pumpkin and use that in your recipe. That is the GAPS approved way.

I did not do that. I used organic coconut flour from the store and a can of pumpkin. It is up to you how diligent you will be in following the GAPS recommendations!

One way to simplify this process would be to cook and mash a butternut squash in place of pumpkin. That is easy and many GAPS people do it.

Truly, this is a quick and simple recipe, once you have your coconut flour and pumpkin ready to go. You can pretty much mix it all up and bake it!

Start with the eggs. You can use whole eggs, which make a richer pumpkin cake. If you have a lot of excess egg whites, as happens to a lot of people on GAPS, you can use those instead. The cake will be a bit lighter and less rich, and still good. 6 whole eggs or 12 egg whites, give or take.

Add your coconut flour, honey, baking soda, salt, and spices. Mix them all very well while you melt the butter.

Brush a bit of the melted butter around the sides and bottom of an 8″ square pan, then pour the rest into your batter and mix it in well. Now is the times to add any extras, like nuts or chocolate chunks. Pour the batter into your buttered pan.

Bake about 45 minutes at 350° F, until the edges are brown and a toothpick comes out of the center with only a few crumbs. Cool a bit before slicing, if you can wait, and store well wrapped.

What if I can’t use one of the ingredients?

It depends!

eggs— You need the eggs. If you can’t eat eggs yet, this is not the recipe you are looking for.

coconut flour— Because coconut flour works very differently from other flours, it is hard to substitute for it. My best suggestion would be to try zucchini flour. Both coconut flour and zucchini flour are “thirsty” flours; they absorb a lot of liquid, so you don’t need very much of them. They function very differently from other flours and starches! I haven’t tried it, so I can’t say for sure that it would work out. Please let me know what happens if you try it!

butter— Plenty of people have to avoid butter. Ghee would be an easy swap, and coconut oil is also admirable in baked goods. Other than that, you can probably use whatever oil or animal fat you prefer, preferably one without much flavor of its own.

honey— I haven’t tried this pumpkin bread recipe without the honey. For GAPS people, there aren’t very many options. One might be date syrup. If you aren’t on GAPS, you could try any sugar, sugar substitute, or maple syrup that you normally like in baked goods. Another alternative would be to use half banana and half pumpkin. I have made this recipe with all banana and no honey or other sugar, and that was fine. Bananas are intensely sweet! It will taste quite different, of course!

spices— You can certainly play around with the spices if you need to avoid one or more of the usual pumpkin pie spice ingredients. It will change the taste, of course, and won’t taste good without any spices at all, but you can fiddle with the ones you can use until it tastes right.

Make and Easy GAPS Pumpkin Bread Your Way!

• As mentioned above, you can tinker with most of the ingredients with reasonable hope of success. Keep the coconut flour and eggs, but swap in different fat and sweetener if you want. Try mashed squash instead of pumpkin. Try different combinations of spices!
• Add nuts (or seeds) that have been carefully prepared to be gentle on your tummy. (Click here for how and why to prepare your nuts and seeds.) Pecans and walnuts are both great!
• Add chocolate chips or chocolate pieces. Chocolate isn’t really a GAPS food, but if you aren’t on GAPS you may want to add chocolate chips. The most GAPS friendly way I have found to add chocolate is to chop a small amount of 100% chocolate into small pieces and use those. If they are small, the lack of sugar will not be too apparent in the background sweetness of the cake. GAPS chocolate chips are something of a unicorn; let me know if you can find them! The best I can find use either sugar substitutes or coconut sugar, neither of which are really GAPS compliant. Or try making these!
• For a totally different result, make banana bread by using 2 mashed bananas in place of the pumpkin. I don’t use any honey for banana bread, because the bananas are quite sweet. You could keep it, though.