Oh, how quickly a bunch of perfectly just-a-hair-underripe bananas, purchased with the best of healthy-and-light-eating intentions, can go from fit for snacking or slicing into a bowl of Kashi Crunch to must-freeze-for-pops-and-smoothies to oh-dear-its-time-for-banana-bread. The inevitability of an upcoming banana-bread episode fills me with both glee and guilt—glee because I have an excuse to bake one of my all-time favorite snacks breakfasts nibbles splurges, guilt because most quick breads and muffins—no matter how much good-for-you lowfat yogurt, whole-wheat flour, or unprocessed wheat bran goes in them—are sweet, calorie-dense temptations. You think I’m going to have just one slice? I don’t think so . . .

Two simple criteria make a recipe splurgeworthy. First, the taste, texture, and overall delight must be worth the time and trouble to make it. Second, the experience has to be enjoyable enough to justify the overabundance of fat, sugar, and calories I will end up consuming. Of course, finding splurgeworthy recipes takes considerable trial and error.

→ Click here to go directly to the discussion of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.

Banana breads I’ve known and sometimes loved

From As You Like It

The shortest and easiest recipe for banana bread I’ve used boasts preparation instructions of no more than thirty-eight words, several of which are superfluous. Here it is, actress Linda Purl’s submission to a fundraising cookbook from the Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild:

BANANA BREAD
(from As You Like It, Williamstown Theatre Festival Guild, 1993. Reprinted with permission.)

3 ripe or as-close-to-rotten bananas as you dare
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup raisins or dried currants
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
4 tablespoons melted butter

Mash the peeled bananas by hand, and then mix in all the remaining ingredients, in the order listed above. Pour the batter into a buttered loaf pan, and bake in a 325 degree F. oven for one hour. Serves 6 (one loaf)

As easy as one-bowl brownies! I did make this bread recently, but I don’t remember what I thought of it. But I do remember when I tried it years ago and it was indeed my first loaf for which I “dared” wait until my bananas got really dark. But I already had a go-to banana-bread recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Book of Bread.

From The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones

Though the Book of Bread recipe also made just one loaf, if offered more to love that the Purl bread: more sugar, more egg, more flour, more leavening, more stir-ins, and more moisture (here, in the form of yogurt). It was the first of many “yogurt-enriched” banana breads I would try. I assume the recipe requests plain yogurt of some kind, but according to my in-cookbook notation of December 13, 1992, I payed that detail no mind. I noted, “Very Good (baked with extra banana, low-fat vanilla yogurt, and hazelnuts instead of pecans).”

For at least 18 years I’ve sought a banana bread with more banana flavor than the average recipe offered.

From Eating Well

Despite the success of the Book of Bread recipe, in recent years I’ve embraced lower-fat, lower-calorie, or just healthier banana breads. In retrospect, the two recipes I’ve already mentioned don’t have all that much fat to begin with; their main evils are the sugars and white flour. Bread is bread, after all, and any serving of any bread that’s greater than a modest slice can really ratchet up the calorie count, with our without added sugar. But it doesn’t hurt to add some fiber, in theory, so I’ve most recently relied on a great banana-muffin recipe from the Winter 2004 Eating Well; I’ve made them at least three times just in the past year.

The Eating Well Banana-Bran Muffins recipe calls for more sugar and less banana than the others, but adds buttermilk, wheat bran, canola oil, and optional chocolate chips and walnuts. I always add the chips and walnuts, so we go from low-fat to not-so-low-fat in no time. Still, it’s an easy and healthy recipe (remember, boys and girls, walnuts in moderation are a good thing!), and nicely portion-controlled because they’re muffins. Anyway, the preparation is just as easy as the others (and unprocessed wheat bran can be had super-cheap from the Whole Foods bulk bins). If you add the optional chocolate chips and walnuts, a delicious muffin results, but I cannot pass fair judgment on the banana flavor because the chocolate and walnut might be upstaging it and I haven’t yet tried this recipe without the optional accessories.

From Bon Appétit

Photo: Editor At Large at wikicommons.org

My “healthy” banana-bread choices may reek of hypocrisy — but sometimes I throw the “healthy” criterion out the window altogether. Just last month I was seeking an ultra-yummy banana bread, healthfulness be damned. I took to Epicurious.com, relying on reader comments to find a popular and well-recommended bread. The winner: Banana Bread With Chocolate Chips and Walnuts from Bon Appétit.

Now we’re in really high-fat territory, with a whole stick of butter — twice as much pure fat as the other recipes in this collection — before you add larger amounts of chocolate chips and toasted walnuts than the Eating Well recipe required. Nevertheless, I wanted a treat. And this recipe had easy preparation instructions, as do the others, except that the chips and nuts aren’t folded in as a final step as in other quick-bread recipes. Instead, you initially “combine chocolate chips and walnuts in a small bowl; add 1 tablespoon flour mixture and toss to coat.” Then, when the batter is ready:

Spoon 1/3 of batter into prepared pan. Sprinkle with half of nut mixture. Spoon 1/3 of batter over. [sic!] Sprinkle with remaining nut mixture. Cover with remaining batter. Run knife through batter in zigzag pattern.

So, the chocolate chips and walnuts form a streusel. Cool. I couldn’t wait to see that zigzag pattern in action.

But, alas, with added complexity comes added opportunity for mishaps, even if you’ve read the recipe ahead of time. I had waited until I started assembling ingredients to toast the walnuts in a small skillet. As soon as the nuts started toasting, they quickly browned and continued to darken even after I took the pan off the heat. To prevent them from burning, I dumped them into the bowl of chocolate chips and started to stir — melting the chocolate chips! Panicked, I threw the bowl into the fridge — what would you do? Ten minutes later, I retrieved what was now a giant chocolate-nut cluster. Was it a huge, tasty chunk of candy? Yes. Was it streusel? No. I let it rest on the counter a bit before trying to break it into as many little pieces as possible with a knife, then proceeded with the recipe. My little chocolate pieces were too big to distribute as a streusel—no way could I cover two layers of batter with these chunks—so one-third of the way up, I got a thick chocolate-nut layer.

The resultant loaf was satisfyingly moist and sweet—but the chocolate layer, though isolated, carried most of the flavor. Not necessarily a bad thing, but banana breads should taste like banana.

The Cook’s Illustrated recipe

Since my latest banana-bread event was so devilish, I had given myself an edict of no more baking for the rest of the summer. Pumpkin breads and apple muffins can wait until fall!

That edict stood until the Friday I spotted the cover line “Extreme Banana Bread: SIx Bananas in One Loaf” on the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated (August 2010). Whoa! Six bananas!!!!!! I bought the issue without even looking inside, except to quickly check the ingredient list. Indeed — six bananas!!!!!! I hightailed it to Whole Foods and bought a bunch of seven large bananas, figuring the bananas should be bread-ready by the following weekend.

Only after committing some precious weekend time and a large bunch of bananas did I read the accompanying article, by Andrea Geary. In sum:

The goal: “Figure out how to cram as many bananas as possible into the loaf without sinking its cake-like texture” or “turning the loaf into pudding.”

The challenge: Adding extra banana oomph without weighing the bread down or jeopardizing the texture with extra moisture

The alleged solution: Banana juice, extracted from the bananas then reduced to about half

Full disclosure: I started preparations (that is, began assembling the mise en place) Saturday night at 9:00, though recent experience had prompted me to toast the walnuts ahead of time. Another disclosure: I find nothing wrong with banana bread with a pudding-like texture, especially when the bread is frozen.)

Step 1. Standard: prepare loaf pan, whisk together dry ingredients.

Step 2. Here’s where complexity starts to breed mishaps. To prepare the bananas for the extraction of their juices via the microwave, I placed the bananas in large bowl, sealed the bowl with plastic wrap, and vented the plastic with paring knife — all as instructed. Then I was to microwave the bananas for five minutes “until bananas are soft and have released liquid.” After three minutes I had detected very little liquid, so I set the oven for two minutes more and walked away. Back at 1:45 into this round, I noticed ballooning plastic wrap that might soon pop, despite the paring-knife vents. “This can’t be good,” I thought. Sure enough, puddles of banana juice had formed on the plate and floor of the oven.

Banana-juice puddles

The bananas gave off a nice aroma with their juice, but what a mess! I quickly removed the sticky bowl, peeled off the plastic, and dumped its contents into a strainer already waiting over another bowl.

There was no easy way to determine how much juice was lost, so I nuked the sixth of my seven bananas. More concerned about the potential loss of banana flavor than the possibility of adding too much moisture, I threw the entire replacement banana, guts and juice, into the strainer with the other five.

The bananas should drain for fifteen minutes; I hadn’t accounted for that much extra time (I’m often guilty of not reading recipes closely ahead of time). Well, at least I can clean out the microwave while the bananas drain. The result: just under a cup of juice.

Juice from five to six bananas.

According to step 3, reducing the juice to one-quarter cup should take about five minutes if cooked over medium-high heat. Impatience set in after ten minutes of pot watching with no noticeable reduction. I shut off the heat and decided to use whatever was in the pan after the bubbling died down. Instead of the prescribed quarter-cup of reduction, I had—and used—a scant half-cup of who-knows-how-reduced-it-really-is juice. This step also required that I “stir liquid into bananas, and mash with potato masher until fairly smooth.” This baffled me for two reasons: I thought it would make more sense to do any banana mashing before the addition of liquid, and the occasional stirring of the bananas and pressing them against the strainer while they were draining (as instructed in step 2) gave me a smooth enough mash that the use of my Oxo Good Grips Smooth Potato Masher had no effect.

Step 4 instructs to slice the sixth (now my seventh) banana and shingle the slices on both long sides of the loaf before baking. I was concerned I would run out of slices halfway down the second side, so I alternated sides while applying slices. That worked well; there were enough banana slices as long as there was not too much overlap. After successfully shingling the slices, I was so excited to be finally putting the batter in the oven (as it was, the bread would not be out of the oven until after midnight), I forgot to sprinkle some sugar on top, which Geary says would have helped “the buttery slices caramelize” and given the loaf “an enticingly crisp, crunchy top.”  How disappointing. I do love enticingly crisp, crunchy tops.

After 65 minutes, a toothpick came out clean and the top was quite brown, so I removed the loaf and let it rest. After the 15-minute in-pan cooling, I was ready to flip it onto a wire rack to cool further. I’ve done this with breads a gazillion times, but this evening (or was it morning already?) I was stymied. Normally I’d put my hand or a dishcloth over the top of the bread to catch the loaf in my palm before inverting the loaf onto the rack. But this bread, though gorgeous, was moist and a little sticky on top, with two fragile rows of banana shingles down each side.

Lookin' good, but how shall I invert this moist, fragile loaf onto the rack?

Without further thought, I quickly but gently released the loaf upside-down onto the rack then coaxed it onto its bottom before the top had time to settle on the rack. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until it was too late that one of the rungs had snagged the edges of one row of banana shingles, dislodging most of them as I turned the bread. Bleary-eyed, I slapped the shingles back onto their side of the loaf without rotating the loaf to see what I was doing. The result was not pretty, but there wasn’t much else I thought I could do. Oddly enough, the edges of all the shingles had turned purple.

Overall, though, a good-looking loaf with a beautiful crust, though the top and especially the sides might have been wetter than Geary would have desired. The bread didn’t look wet, but you could tell just by skimming a fingertip along the sides that the cake was very moist.

Gary’s verdict of the freshly baked loaf: “Light and fluffy texture, not dense and heavy. Tender. Very strong banana flavor. Bready-to-cakey fluffiness.” He said that he was perfectly happy with other banana breads, but that this was a nice change. But did he tag on that last bit because I was the creator of those “other” breads? Hmm.

I thought the bread had a nice banana flavor, but I couldn’t help wanting even more. The texture was nice and moist. Not dry. Not wet. Nice and moist. After sitting overnight, the texture seemed creamier yet firmer. The walnuts were a nice touch, as they usually are, and I did not miss the chocolate chips of my other recipes.

Though the bananas along the sides did add extra bursts of banana flavor, that advantage was short-lived: As I sliced the loaf further, the shingles slipped off both sides. Instead of trying to reattach them, some for a second time, I… er… took care of them.

The bread toasted well. In a few days, I will determine how well it freezes as individually wrapped slices.

General comments and afterthoughts

♦ I was disappointed that the sixth banana called for didn’t actually make it into the loaf.

♦ Extra flour might have compensated for the extra banana liquid, but texture wasn’t an issue for me — it was all about flavor, flavor, flavor. Though I do wish I had remembered to sprinkle that sugar on top.

♦ Parchment paper might have helped with the loaf inversion, either as a sling added before the batter, or as the barrier between palm and bread during inversion.

♦ There was a slight color variation in the loaf: darker on top, lighter on the bottom (see photo, right). I wonder if this means I should have baked it longer to get more color, or just the opposite.

♦ Would dipping the banana shingles in lemon juice have prevented the baked banana edges from turning purple?

♦ Were my bananas dark enough to begin with (see lead photo)?

Recipe ratings

Source: Cook’s Illustrated, August 2010
Ingredients: A-. All ingredients are easy to find and store, but bananas have to be purchased at least a week ahead. And buy an extra banana, just in case.
Overall time estimate (with all ingredients at the ready): 2½ hours
Taste: A-. There is always room for more banana flavor.
Presentation: A-. Be aware of those fragile, colorful shingles.
Healthfulness: C. (Per 1/12 loaf: 284 calories, 11g fat, 163mg sodium, 44g total carbs, 3g dietary fiber, 4g protein. Percent daily values: 6% vitamin A, 10% vitamin C, 3% calcium, 7% iron. Nutritional data via nutritiondata.com.)
Practicality (via No-whining Dining’s current food and cooking philosophies): B
Splurgeworthy? Hm. Not sure. I’ll give it another try before deciding.
Overall grade: B+