Bare-metal application from u-boot (Cyclone V)

I have a DE10-nano board for which I have build Yocto u-boot and Linux. Linux boots fine.
Now I want to build a bare-metal application to execute from u-boot.
I don’t want to touch FPGA at all. All the examples I’ve seen instructs to do a lot of magic with handoff files, EDS, etc.

My questions are: can I cross compile an application (maybe link with hwlibs), load it directly to memory in u-boot and execute it? I guess I’ll need to offset addresses and add a header to the binary.
Is this possible without touching the FPGA?
Is there a recipe for that?

Thank you!