THE Best Banana Bread

I've made many a loaf of banana bread in my day. I had great success with a sour cream based recipe. I prefer nuts. I like a banana bread with a lighter texture. Not quite cake, a bit moister than that.

Banana bread is quite controversial. I've tried many recipes. MANY recipes. Dana's got a really good one that is even lighter than mine. Julie and Aaron make variations on the Joy of Cooking's recipe which are really tasty. In my quest for the best banana bread, I've read through recipe after recipe and made lots of them. Using butter, shortening, oil, yogurt, applesauce, bread flour, cake flour, baking powder, baking soda, whipping egg whites, using only egg yolks, buttermilk, milk, soy milk...you name it, there IS a banana bread recipe out there that uses it.

To be clear, I do not count banana breads with additions other than walnuts to be legitimate. The addition of coconut and dried fruit is...well, silly. I'd consider making a banana bread with coconut for Rich if he really wanted it, but I don't think he cares enough.

While reading through the Epicurious site's recipes for banana bread, I was reading the reviews of one of the recipes when I stumbled across a recipe in the comments! There are comments which review the recipe, which is like seven pages into the 24 page comments section! The comments kept referring to John from MA's recipe, so I tried it. Pretty darn good. I don't add vanilla and spices, although I'm sure they'd be great. I just make it as is with some of the nastiest, ripest bananas ever.

Bananas are a...touchy subject in our house. I buy them. No one eats them. They turn brown. I don't buy them, suddenly Drew and Rich can't live without them, they eat a few and then the rest turn brown. I have taken to freezing them when they achieve blackness to a degree that even I would not eat them.

The black banana thing is a result of a recipe for banana bread from the Olives dessert cookbook which is part of a banana nut bread pudding with all sorts of yumminess. Anyway, in that recipe, you take the blackest, nastiest bananas and beat the bejeezus out of them. Honestly, that is how the recipe reads!

I figured, hey, black bananas are black bananas, so I started using grossly black bananas for all my banana bread. And...well, only good things have happened. I tend to decrease the volume of sugar in all my banana bread recipes by at least a third since the bananas have plenty of their own sugar. And even as I strain most of the kind of gross liquid from the bananas before dropping them into the mixing bowl, they retain enough moisture that the bread is never dry. Plus there is no way to tell once they're frozen how gross or not they were as freezing turns them black, anyway. I just pack them in a gallon sized ziploc bag (they tend to ooze a little sometimes) and pull out a few to thaw whenever I want to make banana bread. It's pretty handy, actually. Note that everything I have read about freezing bananas recommends freezing them in their peels, whole. After thawing, the skins come off very easily and can be discarded or composted, per SOP.

Anyhow, my recipe du jour for the Best Banana Bread is below. As I mentioned, I use about a third to half less sugar. And I use room temperature butter and eggs. Many of the comments about this recipe note that adding a dash of vanilla, a pinch of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, or an assortment of other spices only enhances the flavor. Add what you want. Don't add anything. It's whatever you want. And remember to do!

John from MA's Banana Bread

1 cup sugar
1/2 cup buttter, at room temperature
3 ripe bananas
2 eggs, beaten
1 1/3 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup crushed walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Sift the flour, salt, baking soda three times. Yes, THREE times. (Apparently this is the magic number for fully uniformly distributing the soda and salt. Alternatively, you could put it all into a stand mixer bowl and just whip it around with the whisk attachment for a few minutes.)

Cream butter and sugar.

Add bananas and eggs. Beat thoroughly to incorporate.

Add all the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Stir in the nuts and pour into a 9 x 5 loaf pan. Bake for exactly 55 minutes. (Seriously. 55 minutes. I get twitchy and rotate the pan after fifteen minutes. That's optional if you have a well balanced oven. Mine has a hot spot, so I'm a paranoid rotater.)

Note: I have used an 8 x 4 loaf pan with Magic Cake strips to great success. Without the strips, the bread would have gotten very overcooked on the edges and exploded out the top of the smaller pan. This way, I got a realy nice and even loaf that looked really pretty and tall. Alternatively, just use those lovely disposible wax loaf pans and adjust time accordingly.

And voila. That's it. The Best. For now. :)