The Best Gluten Free Pumpkin Bread

So here’s the thing. This gluten free pumpkin bread is mind boggling…because it’s so fluffy and light, you’ll think that it must have gluten! This quick bread is our favorite trick for fall, and we’ve already been testing it on lots of friends and family. The best part? It’s made of 100% oats, no refined flour at all! It’s cozy spiced, just sweet enough and packed with all the nutritional benefits of oats. You’ll love it, your friends will love it, and they’ll be amazed there’s no gluten to speak of.

The trick to gluten free pumpkin bread? Blend up oats!

The trick to this bread is that it’s all made in a blender. That also makes it seriously easy to whip up, because all your mess is contained in one place! Here are a few notes about this magic trick:

Use Old Fashioned rolled oats. Don’t even think about substituting steel cut oats: they have a much different texture! The blender can blend down rolled oats in a matter of seconds into homemade oat flour. Use a great blender. You’ll want a good blender as your workhorse! A high speed blender works best, but you can use a standard blender. Just blend until the oats are ground into a find powder.

Use purchased oat flour as a substitute

If you’d like, you can also use purchased oat flour as a substitute for the rolled oats! Use an equal amount of the flour. Typically store-bought oat flour is ground very finely, which makes for a perfect light and fluffy texture. Looking for what to do with oat flour? Try our Oat Flour Recipes.

Use purchased or homemade Pumpkin Pie Spice!

The best part of this gluten free pumpkin bread is the spices! This bread is spice-forward, to conjure up all those fuzzy sweater and fire-side vibes. You can use purchased pumpkin pie spice, but we like making our own! We find it makes for the absolute best spice blend. You can also use your own spices to approximate it without making the whole batch. Here are a few options:

Make a batch: Mix up this Pumpkin Pie Spice: it makes ¼ cup, which is enough for 2 pumpkin bread recipes Substitute these spices: For the 2 tablespoons pumpkin spice in the recipe, use 1 tablespoon cinnamon, 1 teaspoon each ground ginger and allspice, and ½ teaspoon each cloves and nutmeg.

What to expect with this gluten free pumpkin bread

Two things to note about this gluten free pumpkin bread! Because it’s made of 100% rolled oats, the texture is slightly more dense than a traditional loaf. (See a few tricks on how to manage that below.) But, the overall feedback is that it’s impressively fluffy! It’s also just sweet enough: not as sweet as most pumpkin breads, which can be intensely sweet. Here’s what a few of our recipe testers had to say:

“Made the gluten free pumpkin bread for a party and everyone loved it. Loved how it is healthy with all natural ingredients.” “I would have never guessed this was gluten free! The last pumpkin bread recipe I made with oats was SO dense and lacked pumpkin flavor. This one is so light! LOVE!”

Make sure to cool fully, and cut thick slices!

Two notes on making the perfect gluten free pumpkin bread:

Make sure to cool it fully. Do not try to cut this bread before it’s cooled! If you cut it right out of the oven, it will crumble and fall apart. If desired, add a glaze. Drizzle with this pumpkin bread glaze if you like. Cut thick slices! Because there’s no gluten, it’s best to cut thick slices (as you see in the photo). This ensures the slices will stay together.

And that’s it! We hope you love this gluten free pumpkin bread and that it becomes a favorite as it has in our house.

Want a gluten free vegan pumpkin bread?

It’s easy: all you have to do is substitute the eggs with flax eggs! A flax egg is water and ground flax seed, which works as a binder in vegan baked goods. The texture will change a bit, but flax eggs work well as substitutes for vegan baking.

More gluten free blender breads and muffins

There are so many tasty gluten free quick breads and muffins! We love the oats in a blender method especially for muffins. Here are a few more muffin recipes and breads using this technique:

Try our fan favorite Healthy Banana Bread Muffins Whiz up a loaf of Healthy Banana Bread Sample Blueberry Oatmeal Muffins or Favorite Applesauce Muffins Whip up a batch of Banana Oatmeal Pancakes or Apple Cinnamon Pancakes