No wait. No yeast of any kind. No fancy technique. Just a way to use what's on your counter and turn it into something warm.
Ingredients
| Ingredient | Amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Very ripe bananas | 260 g (about 2 large) | Black-spotted, soft. The blacker the better. |
| Buttermilk | 60 g | Its acidity is what activates the baking soda |
| Brown sugar | 120 g | Light or dark |
| Eggs | 100 g (about 2 large) | Room temp |
| Melted butter | 85 g | Or neutral oil |
| Vanilla | 5 g | About 1 tsp |
| All-purpose flour | 260 g | |
| Baking soda | 5 g | About 1 tsp |
| Salt | 3 g | About ½ tsp |
| Cinnamon | 3 g | Optional but very good |
Method
1Preheat
Oven to 350°F. Butter and line a 23 cm loaf pan.
2Mash the bananas
Fork-mash the bananas in a large bowl. Some lumps are fine — they melt into pockets of banana flavor.
3Mix wet
Add buttermilk, brown sugar, eggs, melted butter, and vanilla. Whisk until smooth.
4Add dry
Sprinkle flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon over the wet ingredients. Stir with a spatula until just combined. Lumps okay. Overmixing is the only way to ruin this bread.
5Bake
Pour into the pan. Bake 55–65 min until a toothpick comes out with moist crumbs (not wet batter). Internal temp ~203°F.
6Cool
10 min in the pan, then out onto a rack. Try to wait until warm — not hot — to slice.
Compared to
The published recipes I studied when writing mine down. Respect to the bakers who came first.
The canonical discard banana bread — butter, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda and powder, salt, mashed banana, honey, eggs, discard starter, flour, optional nuts. The most widely cited version of this recipe type online.
