Raw Banana Bread

Rating: ***

Ingredients:

1. 5 bananas
2. 1 2/3 cups roughly chopped carrots (peeled)
3. 1/4 cup water
4. 1/4 cup dates
5. 1/2 cup chia seeds (or flaxseed meal)
6. 1 tablespoon vanilla
7. 1 teaspoon cinnamon
8. 1 pinch sea salt
9. 1 cup raisins
10. 1/2 cup chopped pecans (or chopped walnuts)
11. 1/4 cup sesame seeds
1. Directions:

1. Get out a large mixing bowl. Place raisins, pecans and sesame seeds in bowl. Set aside for later.

2. Place water, peeled bananas, vanilla, cinnamon and sea salt into your high speed blender. Once blending, add chopped carrots and dates. Mixture will be pretty thick. Try to avoid adding any extra water (besides the initial quarter cup). Blend until nicely combined and smooth, like a smoothie.

3. Try to do this step quickly: Add chia seeds to blender mixture and blend well. Since the mixture is already quite thick, your chia seeds might get stuck at the top of the mixture. If so, turn blender off and create an air pocket down the side of the mixture. Also, use your Vitamix tamper (big tool for mixing, like a big spoon) if you have one. Start blender on low again and increase speed. (Remember that chia seeds will thicken the mixture even more so work fast!)

3. Once your mixture seems as smooth as you can get it, find the mixing bowl that you set aside in step 1. Now, pour/spoon blender mixture on top of rasins, pecans and sesame seeds. Mix with a spoon. This should now resemble regular, Standard American Diet (SAD) banana bread batter.

4. Line two dehydrator trays with parchment paper or teflex sheets. (Do not use wax paper! It'll stick and be a disaster!)

5. Pour half of raw banana bread batter onto each tray. Smooth batter out with the back of a spoon (or with a palette knife/cracker spreader). Batter should be a 1/4 of an inch thick or a bit less. The thinner the batter is the better it will dehydrate, although you don't want it too thin because you want some moistness in the middle like "raw banana bread slices" not like dried out "banana crackers or cookies" if you know what I mean!

6. Dehydrate on high for 1.5 hours. Reduce temperature to 105 degrees and dehydrate your banana bread for another couple of hours. Once it seems to be holding together and drying out, score lines into the crackers with a knife so that you can more easily break them up later.

7. Keep dehydrating. At some point once they appear to be holding together very well you’ll want to remove the parchment paper, flip them over and finish dehydrating them. (You want to remove the parchment paper so that the air can flow around better without being blocked by the parchment paper.)

8. One you've flipped over your banana bread slices, keep monitoring based on how dry/moist you want your banana bread slices to be. Dehydrator times and temperatures can vary greatly so I urge you to check this raw banana bread recipe quite frequently. Don't be afraid to taste test, especially if you are new to dehydrating.

9. Once your banana bread is done, remove from dehydrator.  Eat some right away, and let the others cool.

Comments: This recipe was really good, even though it didn’t turn out as planned. I made a couple of changes when making it (taking out the nuts and sesame seeds and adding coconut) and I would make a couple more. On the recommendations of Mrs. Trumpower I would add some honey to the recipe. I would also put it in the dehydrator for longer because it was a little bit undercooked (the recipe called for a more advanced dehydrator with heat settings). Overall I would say that this recipe was really good, but it wasn’t banana bread; it was more of a banana fruit bar.

Source: "The Rawtarian: Raw Banana Bread Recipe." The Rawtarian RSS. Web. 23 Jan. 2015. <http://www.therawtarian.com/raw-banana-bread-recipe>.