Ever notice how some banana breads are better than others? You can improve your banana bread in all the ways that count – Moistness, lightness, texture, and an over-the-too flavor that will have everybody asking how you did it.
The secrets for making great banana bread are divided into two types: ingredient tips and process tips. Bananas which look over-ripe and unattractive for eating are actually the finest fruit for banana bread. Buttermilk or yogurt add extra moisture and depth; while increasing the baking soda will help it rise and provide a fluffy, light texture. A hint of vanilla provides flavonoids, creating a candy-like, aromatic fruitiness.
Whether you’re having trouble turning out a good loaf of banana bread, or are simply searching for the Holy Grail of this popular loaf, you will find here the answers you seek. Even those working with gluten-free flour will find plenty of tips here that will not interfere with their dietary concerns.
How to Ripen Bananas on the Day you Bake
Great banana bread starts with perfectly ripe bananas. When a banana ripens to the point where no one wants to eat it, it has reached banana bread potential.
Some people buy bananas with an eye toward baking up a fresh loaf ASAP; only to grow increasingly desperate when days go by and the fruit is still nowhere near useable.
Ripening your bananas in the oven is the most commonly cited banana bread hack on the internet. Simply placed your washed, unpeeled fruit on a baking sheet and place it in a preheated, 300° oven. The peels will be evenly dark brown when ready, half an hour or more, depending on the size of the fruit.
Let them cool before you use them, so you don’t burn yourself or curdle your eggs.
How to Ripen Bananas a Bit Faster
If you’re not in too much of a rush, the folks at Chiquita Bananas have some advice:
Putting your unripe bananas in a warm spot will surely help them to ripen faster – on a windowsill in the sunshine would be perfect, or on top of a fridge, towards the back, where the heat exchange radiator is located. Depending on how hard and green your bananas were when you bought them, it can take anywhere from one day to as much as four or five for them to reach [their] ideal ripeness.”
Chiquita Banana
My favorite fruit-ripening technique is to put it into a brown paper bag with an apple. It will give off a gas that will ripen the fruit. I do this with pears all the time, as well.
Keeping the bunch together will also facilitate ripening.
Better Flour Makes Better Banana Bread
I like quality ingredients where it’s obvious, like meat. For years, however, I thought flour was flour. Not true. King Arthur Flour makes a huge difference in all your baking, including banana bread. It has more protein than other brands, so it’s more nutritious. Plus, it’s not bleached or bromenated, both of which are unhealthy. Most of all, it simply performs better in every way – Texture, flavor, and all-around wholesomeness.
Another huge difference you can make by switching up your flour is to use self-rising flour. King Arthur makes this, as well; and their self-rising flour makes an even better banana bread than their all purpose flour, if you can imagine that!
In case you’ve never used self-rising flour, you will love the main feature of it, which is that it saves you several steps – It includes the salt and baking powder, as well as flour; so you don’t need to deal with these additions at all. Self-rising flour makes an indiscribably moist, tender, light banana bread. I would recommend it strongly for any quickbread you make, such as cranberry, blueberry, and tea breads.
Do Leavening Right to Keep Banana Bread Light
Start by making sure that your baking powder is fresh. If it is more than six months old, it may be starting to lose its potency.
You also want to make sure that it does not contain any form of aluminum. That aluminum leaves a peculiar aftertaste. Another issue with aluminum is that it may be linked with serious illness. An article from the National Library of Medicine states:
Aluminum is related with many brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis… Aluminum exposure with diet can be through foods, food additives, water, and contamination of aluminum equipment/utensils.”
National Library of Medicine
Include in your banana bread recipe 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda, as well, for even more lightness and fluffiness.
Sugar Swaps: come over to the dark side (of Banana Bread)
Swapping brown sugar for standard table sugar is an ingredient upgrade that will improve your banana bread on several fronts. You will note a deeper, more complex, caramel flavor. It will also provide additional moistness. The choice of dark brown sugar over the light variety will intensify these qualities.
Do not confuse brown sugar with natural sugar. Brown sugar is refined white sugar with some molasses added. Natural sugar is simply unrefined sugar crystals. If, however, you are choosing between natural sugar and refined white sugar, the natural sugar will provide tastier results and is less unhealthy.
Brown sugar measures a bit differently than regular sugar. You must push it down into the cup as you measure it. When you do, you will feel it compacting, a sensation you would not get with white sugar. You don’t need to apply a lot of force; but if you do not measure brown sugar correctly, you will notice the difference in your banana bread.
Similarly, natural sugar will yield less sugar per measured cup, although not to the extent of brown sugar. Packing it down will not help, either – The problem is that natural sugar has larger crystals; and, thus, larger pockets of air in the measuring cup. If you are looking to cut back the sweetness, you will be happy to measure it as called for. To keep the same sweetness, though, add an additional 1 – 2 Tablespoons when using natural sugar.
A word of caution to anyone who simply wants to cut back the sugar – When you do so, your bread will be less moist and tender. You may be able to compensate for this with added moisture, be it from egg, yogurt, more banana, etc..
Peanut Butter: give your Banana Bread a healthier fat with a flavor kick
You can replace half the fat in your recipe with peanut butter. This will add protein, making banana bread a more protein-enriched breakfast choice for your family.
It also adds an amazing flavor, one of those things that is more than the sum of its parts.
Can I Cut in Half the Fat in Banana Bread?
If you simply desire to reduce the amount of fat in the recipe, you might do that. Just as a general quickbread/muffin rule, I use 1/4c to 1/2c fat, depending on how much other moist stuff is in the batter.
When you cut fat, you will cut moisture, yes; but I find that any quickbread with more than 1/2c of fat is floppy, greasy, and disgusting. This, by the way, applies to recipes that use 2c flour and yield one loaf.
What Can I Substitute for Buttermilk in Banana Bread Recipes?
Buttermilk is wonderful for baking, if you have some. The problems with buttermilk are that most people don’t like it for anything but baking, and it comes in a quart, when you just need a cup.
Buttermilk is fabled to be wonderful for a hangover, though, so maybe there’s some potential there? Other than that, it can be a bridge too far to buy this expensive ingredient, only to have 3/4 of it rot in the fridge.
One excellent solution is powdered buttermilk. Another, although not as good, is powdered milk.
The sub you find everywhere is to add a tablespoon of vinegar to regular milk. This has always struck me a somewhat ignorant – Buttermilk, despite its smell, is not curdled milk, it’s cultured milk. Given this, a more accurate substitute would be to blend another cultured product with milk.
My top choice for this is Greek yogurt. Regular yogurt is also a good option, as is sour cream, kefir, or even cottage cheese.
By the way, buttermilk is the milky liquid that’s left over after butter is made.
How Do I Make Banana Bread Taste Better?
The most common solution for getting your banana bread to taste better is to add real vanilla extract. Vanilla will add that deep, candy-like flavor that makes everyone love baked goods. Given the high cost of real vanilla, though, it’s good to have some other options.
Most people who find vanilla too expensive will buy artificial vanilla. You don’t want to do this. It has a nasty chemical taste, no depth of flavor, and it’s unhealthy. Here are my four favorites:
- Peanut butter whiskey is shockingly good. Adding a tablespoon will provide notes of circus peanut and caramel. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some vanilla in peanut butter whiskey, because I get hints of that in its flavor, as well.
- Brandy is another liquor that has vanilla-y tones to it. One tablespoon will bring out the bright fruitiness of the banana, providing a warm hint of the tropics.
- Lime juice and allspice together is a Guatemalan way to flavor your banana bread. Use 2T of the juice and 1/2t allspice for a delicately fresh flavor.
- Chunks of walnut or chocolate provide more than just texture. Both of these ingredients have complex flavors with multiple undertones.
My Banana Bread Gets Stuck in the Pan, Part I: proper pan prep
There are four things that can cause banana bread (or any baked good) to not release from the pan. The first two concern your pan. I’ll discuss the others in a minute, as they can happen after baking.
Low quality or scratched pan
Always bake with good quality cookware that is in useable condition. Avoid non-stick pans – The pans, under that easily-scratched coating are cheap and flimsy. It’s hard to get grease down in the scratches, so that will cause sticking.
Good, sturdy bakeware will last for generations. Look for American made pans, such as those from Nordicware. Yard sales and thrift stores are great sources of older, better quality bakeware.
Is Teflon Safe for Baking Banana Bread?
Authoritative sources, including the American Cancer Society, claim that it is.
An article from Web MD, however, notes that any pet birds present while you bake with Teflon pans may be, almost literally, canaries in the coal mine:
Teflon coating fumes are deadly to birds since their respiratory systems more fragile than ours. If you have parrots and other birds as pets, keep them away from the kitchen while cooking. If they are exposed to the fumes, they may struggle to breathe as their lungs hemorrhage and fill up with fluid, leading to suffocation and death.”
Web MD
Improper pan prep
A high quality pan will release your banana bread with no more than a light greasing. If your pans are troublesome, however, try adding a dusting or flour or a little sheet of parchment or waxed paper cut to fit in the bottom of the pan.
Why is my Banana Bread so Dry?
This is often caused by using too much flour.
Rather than scooping the flour up in your measuring cup, try the King Arthur Flour method. Before you measure, use a spoon to fluff up your flour. Then, use the spoon to sprinkle flour into the cup. Scooping causes flour to compact, and can cause you to add 25% more flour than you intended.
Why is my Banana Bread so Tough?
A common cause of toughness in quickbreads is too much mixing.
Use your mixer to prepare your wet ingredients and sugar. Then, remove the bowl from the mixer. If you want to add anything chunky, like nuts or chocolate, now is the time.
Finally, sift your dry ingredients over the wets. Use a silicone spoonula to give it 15 big stirs (so, scrape and fold while you stir). That will be just enough to mix your batter without activating toughening gluten.
Adding cornstarch is another good way to tenderize your banana bread. Simply replace 1T of flour with an equal amount of cornstarch.
My Banana Bread Gets Stuck in the Pan, Part II: finishing
Here are the other two reasons your banana bread might not release from the pan:
Banana bread removed from the oven too soon
Undercooking is a sure way to have your baked goods stick to the pan. Your loaf is done when it starts to pull away from the sides of the pan and the center springs back when poked lightly with a finger. Another way to tell is to stick a food thermometer into it. 191° F is a good internal temperature for banana bread.
Trying to remove it from the pan without cooling
It’s hard to fight the urge to cut into your banana bread right away and start munching. There are good reasons, however, not to do so. Aside from burning yourself, it may crack when you try to take it out of the pan. Cutting too soon releases valuable moisture from the loaf, leaving the rest of it to dry out once it’s cooled… if there’s any left…
My Banana Bread Always Cracks on Top
A cracked top means a tender banana bread! To get it to not split, you’d have to mix it a lot more assertively. Then, the gluten would form and keep the top smooth… except the resulting texture would be tough.
So, unless you’re a food stylist, making banana bread for a photo shoot, the best advice regarding the cracked top is to just enjoy it – The texture is part of the eating fun. I actually like using the crack to break my slice in half. It makes for daintier eating:)
