At the grocery store the other day, there was a great sale on slightly beat up bananas… Today we had homemade banana bread. I forgot to take a foto before it got cut into, so here it is. You can still see how pretty it is. The landlady popped by with her mom right as it was about to come out of the oven. Que suerte, she’d never tried banana bread before. They both cut in half, the honkin slices that I served, saying they would save the rest for later… and then ate it all right up.
Being the despicable sloppy baker that I am, I have no legit recipe for you. Instead I will yammer a bit about how I made this particular bread, which yielded results that please me. Just like every banana is different, every loaf of homemade banana bread will be different, like it or not. Only once have I been castigated for baking without a recipe, “baking is chemistry; you can’t just do that.” Yes, it is chemistry. And everything discovered about how that chemistry works, came from PLAY. (and yes, I can.)
The first "When I grow up I'm going to be a...." for me was "mad scientist."...specifically "mad"...exploding things and crazy hair.
In the past I made many recipes with ghee in place of butter-butter. I had no refrigerator and so brought home large quantities of butter and clarified it right away, in order to preserve it for up to a year without requiring refrigeration. Thus I already knew how to alter my methods to make this with ghee, which I in turn surmised would be quite similar to working with browned butter.
(If you want to know why browned butter... read about Maillard reactions in cooking here.
Preheat the oven to 180°/350°
I also wanted a bit of a caramel flavor as we had been talking about candy apples and caramel apples last night. So while my 200 grams of browned butter was cooling in the pot (flame off) I threw in about 100 grams of brown sugar stirring for a minute to ensure it wouldn’t burn and let it sit to caramelize on the bottom… then sliced the frozen bananas into that pot, to both cool the butter and sugar quickly and stop the cooking of the sugar while simultaneously thawing the bananas.
They were three bananas because they were the size to need three.
In the meantime I beat two large eggs plus one yolk. This was strange and incidental more than a choice… One of the eggs had a super weak shell and while I was washing it burst open spilling it’s white down the drain. So, I used the remaining yolk and grabbed another egg. Normally I would use two eggs for a regular size loaf. For baking, I have learned to use eggs at room temperature in this case… Eggs at ambient temperature will give you a fuller lighter texture in this case. On the other hand, if you were using cold butter for your recipe, you might want your eggs cold. Cold butter and egg would probably be preferable for a cookie recipe, less so for a bread or cake.
Adding about 75 mililiters of sunflower oil to the butter/banana mix and a squirt of vainilla with the juice of one freshly squeezed orange. You can use mandarinas or even lemon juice. The point is that we bring in not only additional moisture to the batter, but something acidic that will react with the baking soda to create bubbles and fluff up the bread. So, if you prefer, you can use buttermilk, or any kind of “milk” with a few tablespoons of lemon juice added to it, or even apple cider vinegar to make a quick “buttermilk.”
In a separate bowl I sieved 400 grams of “cake” flour, this time regular old glutentastic flour… another 50 grams of sugar, ½ teaspoon of baking powder, ½ tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt, ½ tsp cinammon, a fat pinch of nutmeg. I would have added more spices if I had my mortar and pestle to grind them up what are all whole spices on hand at the moment, but whatever...I also added a small pinch of cayenne pepper and a fat pinch of finely ground black pepper. The eggs were added to the other liquid stuff along with a peeled and grated nub of fresh ginger just about this big…
The easiest way to peel ginger without wasting half of it, for me, is to use the backedge of a butter knife. I buttered and floured a baking dish because there isn’t a loaf pan in the house…
Mixing the wet and dry ingredients begins the baking soda reaction with your acidic ingredient, thus we want to mix only as much as needed to combine well and get this into the oven quickly. It baked for about 45 minutes and then cooled off for about 15 before we cut into it.
So if you have bananas that are getting too brown or there is a sale on bruised up bananas, I hope you’ll throw them in the freezer and make some banana bread and maybe even tell me how you made yours and how it turned out!