…in the kitchen. A friend of mine has a number of banana trees that are producing fruit right now, and to help her get rid of her surplus I accepted a generous gift of bananas last week. (Thanks M!) It turns out that they have a remarkably strong flavour, concentrated a lot by the fact that they were already quite ripe when I got them. That strong flavour meant that I only managed to eat one of them in a given day, even though they are quite tiny.
Well, after some days I still had many of them, and now they were rather far gone down the road of ripeness. Too far, for my tastes, but I did not like the idea of throwing them away. It did not seem in the spirit of the gift at all. Then I hit upon the solution. This means, of course, a long overdue episode of: Asymptotia goes to the kitchen…!
My mum’s recipe could not be used at this point since she was travelling, and there’s an eight hour time difference, so I could not call her to ask for her method. Instead I consulted a replacement that’s sometimes acceptable in times like this: Jim Fobel’s Old Fashioned Baking Book. What was I looking for? Banana Bread.
Most, if not all, of what you need for a quick banana bread is probably in your cupboards already, if you’ve much of a cooking bent, so no special shopping required. Primary ingredients (additions and variations to suit.. see later): 3/4 cup raisins, 1/2 cup dark rum, 1+3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 8 tbsp unsalted butter (melted), 3/4 cup sugar, 2 large eggs, 1 cup (or so) mashed bananas, 1/2 cup chopped walnuts.
Take the raisins and put them into a pan. Grab some dark rum or some bourbon (no way I don’t have some rum to hand, yo ho ho) and pour a cup of that onto the raisins.
(Be sure to replace the raisins and rum that you inadvertently gobbled while measuring them out.) Bring this delicious mixture to a boil, turn it off, cover, and let stand for a while (the book says for an hour… if you’re in a hurry, the duration of the rest of the preparation will be fine, I reckon.)
Well, let’s turn to the heart of the matter, the bananas themselves. Remove the peel from them and put them into a bowl. Grab a fork and crush them into a pulp, taking the time to remove any lumps. You should have a generous cup’s worth of smooth pulp. Cover (perhaps) and put to the side. Turn the oven on to 325 F, so that it is ready for the bread batter you’ll be putting into it shortly.
Measure out the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Pop them all into the same container as you measure since they’ll be mixed together next anyway. At this point, although not in Fobel’s list, I add some grated nutmeg and cinnamon since I can’t imagine baking sweet goods without them. Measure out the sugar into a different container.
Again, I find white granulated sugar can be a bit boring, and so I made more than half the sugar measurement out of brown sugar. I’ve also toned down the sugar overall a bit. Recipes in cookbooks from the US involving fruit always have far too much sugar for my tastes. Chop up the walnuts. Make the bits a nice range of (small) sizes, for variety and texture. Now to start mixing everything together. Get a nice big mixing bowl and beat the melted butter and the sugar together for a while. Keep at it with a big whisk for some minutes until you get a nice creamy mixture. (No, you don’t need an electric mixer for this! Sheesh.) Now add the two large eggs and mix them in, thoroughly. Then mix in the pulped bananas.
A dash of vanilla essence should be added at this point. Mix in. Now add the raisins, drained of the fluid that might have remained. (The book says discard the fluid at this point. I giggled at this notion as I poured it into a shot glass) No more whisking… stir briskly with a big spoon from now on. Mix them in.
The dry ingredients (flour and so forth) were all in a separate container. Mix them together for a bit. Now mix that all into the main bowl we’ve been working with. Do it in a few stages. Put some in… mix very thoroughly, put some more in, mix again… and so forth until done. Three or four stages ought to do it. You want it all nicely mixed up.
Well, that’s it. Pop it into the greased 9 by 5 bread pan, and pop it into the preheated oven. An upper middle shelf. Not too high up, I’d say, except maybe at the end. Bake for about an hour.
Check it by sticking a dry knife (or some other implement that is thin and smooth) into it and seeing if it comes out dry. Should be almost done by that point. Maybe another short five minutes will do it – don’t over-dry it!
And there you have it. Cool on a rack (leave in pan for a while first, since it is fragile… then turn it out to cool more). Slice, share, and enjoy!
-cvj
Sounds delicious. In our house we also sometimes cook very rip bananas in orange juice, cinnamon, and allspice, and have it for breakfast or as a dessert (although if for the latter, we often flame it).
Enjoy eating it.
–IP
Sorry in the last sentence of my comment, I meant to write “according”, not accorded.
Banana bread sounds interesting. I expect the presence of banana makes it moist. What I do with overripe bananas is to put them in a blender with milk and ice, and make a milkshake. The banana flavour is diluted accorded to the ratio of banana to milk used.
Mmmm.. Banana bread – yum! I freeze bananas when they get too ripe for me to eat for use later in baking. Your recipe looks extremely similar to mine, though I don’t melt the butter, and I usually use sherry or marsala for the fruit soaking as I don’t have rum. And I am not so convinced by the necessity of the “share” injunction – it does keep well for a few days, after all!
Have you added overripe banana to pancakes before? They come out surprisingly light…
anne: skewers are good for poking too.
Hi Anne,
Yes I know about the chopstick use. In fact, I usually use wooden skewers when baking for others.
When baking something for me that is going to be gobbled up in about two days (as was the case here… ahem…) I am less particular about what I test with…
Will look at some of the material you mentioned… thanks! (I’ve browsed McGee before, I think, but don’t own.)
-cvj
Very nice. Chopsticks, you know, are a very good way to measure done-ness. They don’t leave the gash of the everyday knife, as the batter seems to molt back around the initial poke. And nobody suspects!
Also, there are so many gradations between pure white G&H sugar and molasses that are fun to tinker with. Turbinado, all the Japanese and South Seas and Okinawan stuff, etc.. I think Trader Joe’s has several, so it’s easy enough to fool around with, and kind of fun. It comes in different shapes sometimes, but you’ll figure it out.
Chocolate chips can also be a good addition, tho the melting point is different. They can save dried-out cake with melti-ness, I have found.
Do you know Harold McGee? “On Food and Cooking.” There’s a new edition. Lots of good shorthand and references, for explaining the physical props and the reasons why you enjoy the stuff, in lay-person’s terms. I mean, you might as well make those terms up, but he already did it, one version, so why not ride on it, and so on? (That’s a rhetorical question.).
Splenda helps?
Jude:- Yes, it is a shame that the typical grocery store has maybe a couple of the most straightforward varieties.
Moshe:- Actually, I think I agree with you. I cut the sugar in this recipe down by 1/4 to 1/3, but it was still a bit more sweet than I thought was necessary.
Cheers,
-cvj
Predictable sugar comment: to me banana bread needs no added sugar at all, made it before with no sugar added, it is quite sweet if the bananas are ripe. Since there is no other flavor (e.g the sourness of berries) it is really easy to cross the line into the sickeningly sweet territory.
On my first trip to Mexico as a kid, our friend showed us his banana plantation. He was smitten by bananas, so along with the tour, we learned about their propagation, the vast number of banana species, and other esoteric banana facts. I discovered the hard way that some species of bananas are edible only when cooked.