Simply Delicious Banana Bread

Banana bread is one of those sensory memories from my childhood. Mom’s banana bread slathered in softened butter by the fistful. Now that I’m grown and banana’s are always on the grocery list, I find it lacking if brown bananas dont get turned into this tasty treat as often as possible.

Ingredients and Equipment

Making the banana bread checks of a few of my recipe boxes.

• It’s fast. Takes 10-15 minutes of prep time
• You can do it in one bowl. Fewer dishes, better recipe.
• No special ingredients needed.
• It’s freaking delicious.

The bananas are the star of the show, providing a lot of the flavor for the bread. The perfect bananas for banana bread are those that you wouldn’t really eat, not totally brown but good and spotty. The more spots on the banana, the sweeter the fruit. I only had 2 super ripe bananas for this run-through, but any banana that isn’t green will do.

The brown sugar also adds a lovely layer of flavor and makes a darker loaf. If you only have white sugar, you can substitute it in 1:1. The spices are also interchangeable, I use allspice since my wife doesn’t really like cinnamon. I have also been eyeing the Garam Masala or Chinese Five Spice to try out an ethnic variation. Tasty recipes are paved with the experiments before them, so have fun.

As for equipment, I use a 9″x5″ metal bread pan since I know how it will work every time. If you are curious about the differences in pan materials, you can look here for a decent explanation. I use a very oversized mixing bowl that came with our Ambiano stand mixer ($35, hard to beat). The giant bowl allows my helpers to not make a gigantic mess.

The preparation is quite simple. Grease your pan (I use butter) and preheat the oven to 325*F. While its preheating, melt your butter carefully in the microwave and add all the wet ingredients to the bowl. Give it a quick stir to mix everything together. Then add all of the dry ingredients to the sifter and sift in the entire amount to the dry ingredients. The sifter isn’t quite necessary but should improve the texture of the final product.

After everything is in the bowl, I briefly mix it with the spatula to incorporate the flour into the wet ingredients. After the flour is mostly moist, I mix with a hand mixer until it looks similar to the pancake batter. Try not to overmix as this will lead to a super dense brick bread. Still tasty, but this recipe is already dense so I would be gentle.

Bake for 60 minutes and check with a fork for doneness. At 60 minutes the pictured bread was still quite gooey in the middle, so I put it in for another 15. At 75 minutes it came out perfect. Dust with powdered sugar for a nice effect, but it is entirely unnecessary.

Storage

Store your finished bread in Tupperware or plastic wrap. Mine will usually last a week at room temperature if nobody eats it first (unlikely). My favorite part is as they “age” the outside of the loaf gets sticky and that is by far my favorite bits.

In the freezer, you could wrap tightly in plastic wrap and store it for 6 months.

That’s it. Let me know how your family likes it by leaving a note in the comments. If you changed anything, let me know and I will try it out to see if its an improvement. Cheers!