Peanut Butter Loaf

Wotchers!

I love discovering a new product on the supermarket shelves, and one of my recent purchases was peanut powder.

“Fantastic!” I thought, as it tumbled merrily into the trolley.

However it has been sat on the shelf for the past six weeks GUILTING me with it’s non-usage.

So I began a quest¹ to find out what it could be used for.

“Adding protein to stuff” is the summary I have arrived at, but to be a little more expansive, it can also replace a proportion of regular flour in baking to add more peanutty-ness (as well as protein).

So I thought I’d give it a go adapting a recipe that has become all the rage of late – Peanut Butter Loaf.

In 2019, the YouTube channel Glenn & Friends uploaded a video of a 1932 Depression-Era recipe for Peanut Butter Bread.

A couple of months ago, it suddenly became popular on the Old Recipes message board on Reddit.

Whether the current lockdown conditions have sent people scurrying to hunt out recipes such as these, or whether it’s because it is something that can be quickly pulled together from storecupboard ingredients, it also has appeal for those with dietary restrictions in that it contains neither eggs nor butter. You can also make it vegan by using non-dairy milk.

I used Califia Farms carragheen-free almond milk (found at Sainsbury’s in the chiller) for the vegan loaf below.

It is also simple to mix and can be done in a single bowl, although one of my tweaks was to use a second bowl to warm/mix the peanut butter and milk before adding it to the rest of the ingredients.

Peanut Butter Loaf

If you can’t find/don’t have peanut flour, just swap it for regular flour, making 240g in total.

180g plain flour
60g peanut flour
60g caster sugar
2tsp cream of tartar²
1tsp bicarbonate of soda²

½tsp salt
150g smooth peanut butter³
325ml milk – regular or vegan

• Heat the oven to 160°C, 140°C Fan.
• Grease a 1kg loaf tin and set aside.
• It’s very important that you do these two things first, because when the delicious alchemy part comes in the recipe, you have to be quick to get your loaf into the oven in order to maximise lightness and fluffiness.
• Sift together the dry ingredients (first five).
• Put the peanut butter in the microwave and heat for 1 minute.
• Add the salt and half the milk to the peanut butter and whisk in, then add the remainder of the milk and whisk smooth-ish.
• Whisk the peanut mixture into the dry ingredients. NB As soon as the liquid touches the raising agents, they will start to react, like Mentos in a Coke bottle, so you don’t want to take too long with this, as the ‘lift’ effect is finite.
• As soon as the dry ingredients have been incorporated, pour the mixture into your greased loaf pan and even out the top. One, quick side-to-side jiggle motion of the tin is usually enough to level the mixture – don’t spent time smearing the mixture level with a spatula. The cooked loaf in the original video is a bit wedge-ended, and I suspect this is due to the faffing about Glen did levelling the mix.
• Put the loaf straight into the heated oven for 30 minutes.
• When the timer goes off, turn the loaf tin around 180 degrees and bake for another 30 minutes.
• Check for done-ness – you should see a slight gap between the sides of your loaf and the sides of the tin – and remove from the oven.
• Allow to cool for five minutes before turning out and cooling on a wire rack.
• Enjoy warm or cold or toasted, with your favourite toppings.

¹ High-falutin’, low-intensity word for opening a laptop.

² Or 4tsp of baking powder. I prefer to keep tubs of each of these to ensure maximum rise. Commercial baking powder has 25% rice or cornflour mixed in, to keep it from clumping.

³ You can use crunchy if you like – I just find the smooth easier to mix in.