Blueberry Lemon Spelt Quick Bread

This Blueberry Lemon Spelt Quick Bread is a healthy vegan quick bread made with no refined sugar and nutritious spelt flour!The question is: How many blueberries is too many blueberries? Last week we went blueberry picking and came home with 10 pounds of blueberries. Surely, I thought, we’ll have to freeze some of these. Surely our little family of four can’t eat 10 pounds of blueberries before they go bad. I was wrong. We are total blueberry monsters.This Blueberry Lemon Spelt Quick Bread is just one of the blueberry creations to come out of my kitchen in the last week. It all started with the blueberries and a bag a spelt flour I wanted to use. I’ve wanted to try spelt flour for a long time because of its great nutritional profile. I’m glad I finally did!

Here’s what you need to know about spelt flour:

• Spelt is an ancient grain that is a cousin of wheat.
• Spelt is higher in protein than wheat, and is also considered a complete protein.
• Spelt is often tolerated better than wheat by gluten or wheat sensitive people (although it does contain gluten, so it is not safe for people with Celiac disease)
• It is easy to digest.
• It has a nutty, pleasant taste.
• Spelt flour creates baked goods with a light texture (not as dense as whole wheat flour).
• Spelt is high in fiber.
• Spelt is also high in iron, copper, manganese, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, zinc, selenium, niacin, thiamin, vitamin B6, and folic acid.

Variety is key to a healthy diet, so if you are constantly baking with the same flours, I urge you to try something new like spelt! You can find it in most well-stocked grocery stores in the natural foods section. Or you can get it shipped to your door in two days via Amazon. No extra trips to the store for me, thank you very much! While you’re at it, go ahead and pick up some coconut sugar. You’ll thank me later.

This Blueberry Lemon Spelt Quick Bread is the perfect recipe for you to try out spelt flour if you haven’t already. The lemon flavor is subtle, not overpowering. And it’s bursting with blueberries! That’s what happens when you have 10 pounds of blueberries to plow through. You have a heavy hand when it comes time to add the blueberries to your baked goods. Ha! It worked out perfectly, though, and this is a moist and tender whole grain bread.

This recipe is made without refined sugar and is only lightly sweet. It’s not a sickly sweet dessert bread, but it’s just sweet enough. It also happens to be vegan. If you want to use an egg, you can, but I used a flax egg this time and it worked well. 

Even though this is only lightly sweet, my kids ate this like it was cake and treated me like I was a baking hero when I served it to them. I’ll take it!

Plastic bags–ick. I wish I would have thought to bring our own bags.

If you have blueberry picking in your future, put this Blueberry Lemon Spelt Quick Bread on your list to make. If you don’t, then go ahead and buy some extra blueberries! You’ll be happy you did.