Mar

30

Cooking Banana Bread

March 30, 2007 |

Banana Bread is known as a quick bread. As opposed to a yeast bread you don’t need to knead the dough and let it rise. A yeast bread usually takes at least a few hours to prepare before you can even put it in the oven. A quick bread such as most sweet breads like banana, zucchini, and apple bread usually only takes about 15-30 minutes to prepare and then another hour or so to bake.

As quick as it is to make there is still a lot to do to make a good Banana Bread. You want a strong banana taste as well as a good thick moist bread. One of the key ingredients to a good banana bread is overripe bananas. Buy your bananas several days in advance and once they are darkly speckled if not totally black. They get very moist and the taste is very sweet banana. Another ingredient that can make a good size difference is the moistener. Many people use buttermilk, sour cream, or yogurt. What the writers of Baking Illustrated found was that plain yogurt was the best. I have tried sour cream and totally agree that the yogurt is significantly better.

The ingredients needed for banana bread are as follows-

2 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 1/4 cup chopped walnuts

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 very ripe darkly speckled bananas

1/4 cup plain yogurt

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Kitchen Tools needed

-two medium/large bowls

-wooden spoon

-wire whisk

-bread pan

-measuring cups

-measuring spoons

A few additional items that can be useful would be semi-sweet chocolate, coconut, macadamia nuts, orange zest, nutmeg, cinnamon. If you like chocolate chips in your bread you can add 1/2-3/4 cup of it. If you like banana/coco/mac bread add 1 1/4 cups macadamia nuts and 1 cup coconut.

That’s all you need. If you want to have a good Sunday treat for you or to take to your neighbors go pick up your bananas today so they are ripe as possible. Ideally you would have a couple more days to let them ripen more. This weekend we will cook this recipe and there will be pictures demonstrating each step.

Happy Cooking and We Will See You Tommorrow,

David

P.S.-Usually I would post one of my Amazon links but to be honest the best bread pans I have used have been like 4 bucks at Smiths. I tried some $20 pans from Williams Sonoma but they didn’t last much longer nor did they cook any better. The Smiths pans are great and if the stick-resistance material gets scratched I don’t care.

This is a slightly modified recipe from the cookbook “Baking Illustrated” As mentioned in the cookbook review in the last post this is one of the better baking references available. It is chock full of excellent recipes and the art and science of baking. It really is a must have.

, , , , , , , ,


Comments

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Speak your mind

    • Add to Technorati Favorites