Banana Bread

Googling “banana bread recipe” yields around 300 million results. So here’s ours. We’ve made countless banana breads and kept fine-tuning the ratios to come up with a recipe exactly to our liking. Most importantly, this banana bread is full of bananas (many other recipes only call for 1-2 bananas) and keeps moist and chewy for several days. If you prefer crumblier, cake-like banana bread, this one isn’t for you. It’s important that your bananas are very ripe, so go buy some bananas today and you’ll be ready to make this next week.

Note: There are a lot of funny tips online to get bananas to ripen quicker, such as putting bananas in the oven to speed up the ripening, but none of that stuff works. The only meaningful way to speed up the ripening of your bananas is by putting them near apples, or better yet: in a paper bag along with apples. Apples emit ethylene, which speeds up the ripening of other fruit. But even so, you won’t get around waiting a couple of days.

Ingredients:

(makes 1 loaf)

• 500g very ripe bananas (that is 500g without peel), mashed

• 100g butter, melted

• 2 organic eggs

• 80g brown sugar
  (Note: The amount of sugar you should use ranges from 70g - 110g. This is quite a wide range, but it depends heavily on how ripe and sweet your bananas are.)

• 200g flour

• 1 tsp baking powder

• ½ tsp vanilla essence

• 1 pinch of salt

• 1 handful of crushed walnuts

Special Equipment Needed:

• Cake/bread loaf tin

Instructions:

Preparation and wet ingredients

1. Generously grease a cake tin with butter and place it in the fridge.

2. Pre-heat your oven on conventional heat at 180°C.

3. In a medium-sized bowl, mash your bananas using whatever tool suits you best. A potato masher is ideal; a fork will do the job.
   Taste them. Depending on how sweet they are, you can determine the amount of sugar you will use.

4. Melt the butter in a pot over low heat and remove from the heat as soon as nearly no unmelted butter remains.

5. Mix in the sugar and let cool for a couple of minutes.

6. Now add the 2 eggs and whisk everything until slightly foamy.

7. Add this mixture to your mashed bananas along with the vanilla extract. Mix to combine, and set aside.

Dry ingredients

1. Sift the flour into a large bowl. Add the salt and baking powder. Mix to combine.
   Note: We like to use a glass bowl because you’re able to see if any dry flour remains during the next steps.

2. Pour your wet ingredients into the bowl.

3. Gently stir everything together, just until no dry bits of flour remain.
   Important: Do not over-mix, even if you feel like it looks too lumpy.

4. Add the crushed walnuts and gently fold them into the mix.

5. Finally, pour the mix into your cake tin and place it in the pre-heated oven for 45-60 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

6. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes before turning the bread onto a wire rack. Let cool for at least one hour. You’ll be tempted to cut in sooner, but… don’t.

7. Slice using a bread knife (or any other serrated knife) and dig in.

Enjoy!

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