Ingredient

Banana bread

Banana bread is not bread and is barely a cake — it is a quick loaf made by the muffin method, where wet and dry are combined at the last moment and stirred as little as possible. Everything good about it depends on using bananas most people would throw away.

The bananas

A yellow banana is mostly starch. As it ripens, enzymes convert that starch into sugar, the flesh softens, and the aroma compounds that actually taste of banana develop. A firm yellow banana in a loaf contributes moisture and almost no flavour.

You want them black — skin fully black, flesh dark and almost liquid, smelling strongly sweet. That is not a spoiled banana, it is a ripe one, and it is the entire difference between a banana bread that tastes of banana and one that does not.

If yours are not there yet, bake them in their skins at 150°C for fifteen or twenty minutes until black and collapsed. It is not quite the same but it is close, and it takes an afternoon rather than a week.

The method

1. Mash the bananas thoroughly. Lumps stay as wet pockets and are one cause of a raw-looking middle.
2. Whisk the dry ingredients together in one bowl — flour, raising agents, salt, any spice.
3. Combine the wet ingredients in another — melted butter or oil, sugar, eggs, mashed banana, vanilla.
4. Tip the wet into the dry and fold just until no dry flour is visible. Lumps are fine. This is the muffin method and over-mixing is the main way to ruin it.
5. Scrape into a lined loaf tin. A long thin tin bakes far more evenly than a deep square one.
6. Bake at a moderate heat, around 170°C, for an hour or more. Cover the top with foil once it is brown enough.
7. Test in the very centre with a skewer. Banana bread reads as done at the edges long before the middle is.

What goes wrong

• Sunk in the middle — underbaked, almost always. A very wet batter needs longer than it looks. Also too much raising agent.
• Raw and gummy in the centre — same cause. Lower the oven 10°C and give it another fifteen minutes with foil on top.
• Tough and chewy — over-mixed. Fold less.
• Dry — not enough banana, or too much flour, or overbaked. Weigh the flour rather than scooping it.
• Burnt crust, raw middle — oven too hot, or a tin that is too small and deep.

Worth adding

• Dark brown sugar in place of caster gives a deeper, more caramel flavour and extra moisture.
• Soured cream, yoghurt or buttermilk — a few spoonfuls — makes a noticeably more tender loaf.
• A good pinch of salt and a little cinnamon or cardamom. Banana on its own is flat.
• Walnuts, dark chocolate chunks or a handful of oats on top for texture.
• A split banana laid cut-side up along the top before baking, which looks striking and costs nothing.

Common questions