Banana muffins with oats (gluten-free)

This easy recipe for banana muffins with oats is also gluten-free because it's made with oat flour instead of all-purpose flour. You can incorporate chocolate chips or dried fruit like chopped pitted dates, raisins, or cranberries in this recipe.

Making banana muffins with oats

Ingredients and formula

Banana muffins are made from the same ingredients and follow the same formula as basic banana bread: 115 grams (½ cup) fat (either butter or oil) + 200 grams (1 cup) sugar + 2 large eggs + 2 or 3 mashed bananas + (190–250 grams) 1-½–2 cups all-purpose flour + 1–2 tsp chemical leavener + ½ tsp salt.

These banana muffins follow that same formula, but with a few changes:

1. For the fat, we are using softened butter because the flavour of butter is better than the flavour of a neutral oil, which doesn't lend any flavour at all. Unsalted or salted works here.
2. For the sugar, we are using dark brown sugar instead of white sugar. Dark brown sugar gives these muffins a richer flavour and a more tender texture.
3. For the flour, we are using oat flour instead of all-purpose flour, which makes these muffins gluten-free and also gives them a very tender, melt-in-your-mouth quality.
4. For the chemical leavener, we are using baking powder because we aren't dealing with any acidic baking ingredients here. Sure, ripe bananas are a little acidic, but nowhere near as acidic as sour cream or buttermilk, for example. Baking soda would lead to a lot of browning and a different flavour, while baking powder wouldn't have as much of an impact on flavour or appearance.

How to make oat flour from oats

The recipe for these banana muffins with oats is based on this banana bread without baking soda. The all-purpose flour was simply replaced with oat flour, weight for weight. Oat flour makes these gluten-free banana muffins very tender with a moist crumb.

You can buy oat flour at health food stores and some bulk bin stores. But if you can't find it, you can easily make it in a food processor from oats.

Remember that the conversion from weight to volume or grams to cups for oat flour isn't the same as for oats. This baking conversions chart will help you convert volumes to weights, or vice versa.

This recipe calls for 250 grams (2 cups) of oat flour, but 2 cups of large oats only weighs 190 grams. You will actually need to process 2-⅔ cups (250 grams) of large flake oats (or perhaps a little more just to be safe) to get the right volume/weight of oat flour for this recipe.

To make oat flour, I recommend using old fashioned oats or large flake oats. Do not use minute oats nor steel cut oats. These will yield a different texture and also have a different capacity to absorb water. Minute oats and steel cut oats are not good baking substitutions in this recipe.

Mixing method for muffins

The muffins are made using the reverse creaming mixing method, which I prefer for fruit muffins. For this method, the dry ingredients, leaveners, salt, and sugar are mixed together in a big bowl, and then the butter is worked into that mixture to form a crumbly mixture resembling coarse wet sand. Then you stir in the liquids.

The reverse creaming method is very similar to the traditional two bowl muffin method, except in the recipe below, the fat is worked into the dry ingredients.

Making the crumble topping

To make the crumble topping, I reserved a portion of that mixture for later, before adding in the liquid ingredients. This method worked well and allows you to make the crumble topping at the same time as the muffins, speeding up the process and dirtying less dishes!

Now go forth and make these banana muffins with oats with the easy recipe below!