The first thing I ever tried to bake was banana bread. I must have been in my early teens, still living in Accra in the Airport Road house. The details of the recipe and what I did is not clear. What I do remember was that whatever came out of that oven was so awful that even the dog wouldn’t eat it.
Since then, I have experimented with a lot of different kinds of banana bread recipes with many variations and this is the one I settled on. It’s my short hand scribbled note of Tyler Florence’s Banana Bread with Pecans and it is the base of all my banana breads. The key here is the 2 bananas mashed to create the cream base for the batter.
Over the years, I have made numerous substitutions and enhancements to this recipe. Here are some common ones:
- 1/2 cup olive oil for 3/4 c melted butter or 1/2 cup melted butter + 1/4 cup olive oil
- Walnuts or almonds for pecans (because I don’t usually have pecans on hand) but any nut would probably work
- 1/2 cup chocolate chips in addition to the nuts, 1 cup if it’s mini chocolate chips
- Streusel topping
- 50/50 brown sugar/granulated sugar
- 50/50 erythritol/granulated sugar, when I was experimenting with low sugar baking
- Dried cranberries and slivered almonds
- Chopped dates or figs
- 1/4 cup rum or bourbon instead of vanilla
- For GF flour substitution, I use 1.5 cup oat flour + 1/2 cup almond meal + 1/2 cup tapioca flour or 1.5 cup oat flour + 1/2 cup coconut flour + 1/2 cup tapioca flour
This recipe can be made in a bundt pan or doubled for a 9×13 pan or tripled for a chafing pan.
If there is a pro tip for this recipe, it would be a state of the bananas when they are used. Several years ago, I had to order breakfast for about 400 people and decided to order a few cases of bananas. Of course, I had no idea what a case of bananas looked like or how many bananas were in each case. Let’s just say that not enough people ate the bananas and I couldn’t give them away fast enough so I came into possession of a boatload of bananas. I like to eat my bananas just as they develop spots. The dude, on the other hand, likes it slightly green around the tips and stem (YUCK!) so we could not eat them before they started to wither.
Being raised by a dad who had memories of going hungry as a child and a mom whose family owned a farm meant that wasting food was a big no no in our house. When I received my first lecture about leaving food on the plate, it was the entire process of rice farming and how painstaking it was to get one grain of rice on the table. I was about five at the time and it left an impression. So that meant I was compelled to freeze about 7 or 8 gallon freezer bags of peeled bananas.
Frozen, it doesn’t look so bad. But you have to thaw out the bananas before using and that is always a horror show. Black goopy mess in slippery banana liquid with an unctuous, slightly fermented smell that had hints of wanting to be rum… It’s pretty gross. However, it does make the best banana bread batter. I just puree it with an immersion blender for the batter and then the liquid actually gives the finished bread a complex flavor. If you like chunks of bananas in your banana bread, I suggest using ones that are just getting brown on the counter. The other option is to cut the frozen ones into chunks and setting them aside but most of the time, I forget to do this and let’s just say that trying to mash thawed banana is not very pleasant.
These freeze really well, but remember to cut them into single portions first.
What will Dr. Gwak say? 