Quest for best banana bread yields moist, flavorful loaf

How difficult can it be to bake a loaf of banana bread?

I would ask myself this question every time another reader sent in a sorry tale of banana bread gone wrong.
They’re too dry. They don’t rise. They’re mushy in the center. They fall, they slump, they crack, they burn.
Honestly, people, how hard can it be?

I don’t make banana bread often, but I know enough about quick breads to offer my best advice and cover the basics. Is your leavener outdated? What kind of pans are you using? Have you checked your oven temperature with a thermometer?

I realized I had not actually made banana bread in few years, so I decided to try out a few recipes and pick the best one so I would have it to pass on to troubled bakers when they called.

Many loaves later, I stand before you, humbled by the experience.

I tried recipe after recipe and none produced the results I was hoping for. They were too dry. They didn’t rise. They were mushy in the center. They fell, slumped, cracked or burned. But more often than not, they simply didn’t taste as good as I wanted.

Eventually I threw out every recipe I tried, consulted a baking expert and many books on the finer points of quick breads, and began working methodically to create my own foolproof recipe.

Two weeks and one missed deadline into Project Banana Bread, I emerged from the kitchen with one perfect loaf and a world of experience to share.

Let’s start with the mistakes.

The first recipe I tried promised a moist loaf. It had oil, buttermilk, two cups of mashed bananas, and heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks to lighten it. The first batch burned on the outside. When I cut into it, the inside was mushy. Overall, the taste was greasy. The second batch of the same recipe slumped in the center and was even softer than the first. Plus, the recipe had a lot of steps. Toasting and chopping nuts, mashing bananas, whipping cream — I wanted a quicker quick bread.

Recipe No. 2 produced a beautiful-looking loaf. It rose high in the oven, creating the picture-perfect crack along the top. But when I sliced into it, it was bland. Its flavor was flat and left me wanting more — more bananas, more nuts, more sweetness. It was all looks and no substance.

I had high hopes for another recipe that contained sour cream, thinking it would provide the right amount of acid to kick-start the baking soda and give it good rise, while providing additional richness. It tasted good, but was completely dry.

The loaves started piling up in my refrigerator like a line of brown caskets at a cemetery. That’s when I decided to stop baking and start studying.

There are two methods for making quick breads. The creaming method uses a mixer to cream together sugar and shortening or butter, similar to a cookie batter. Every loaf I made using the creaming method turned out dry, so I abandoned it for the stirred method.

Flour, sugar and all other dry ingredients are mixed together in a bowl. The wet ingredients (bananas, eggs, etc.) are mixed in a separate bowl, and then the two are stirred together quickly.

I preferred this method, because, unlike the mixer, it produced a bread that wasn’t tough or dry. To cut down on the stirring even further, I added the nuts to the dry ingredients, making sure they were evenly distributed.

When it came to nuts, I was generous. When a recipe called for just a half-cup of chopped nuts, I was left wondering where they all went. A full cup was better, but a cup and a half, coarsely chopped, produced the kind of walnut-filled loaf I desired.

Breads that were stirred together often called for oil, but I didn’t like the greasiness of these loaves, and I preferred the flavor of butter. Solid butter would require creaming, so I settled on melted butter.

Recipes with one cup of bananas or less lacked the strong flavor I wanted, so I decided to go with a cup and a half. The riper the bananas, the better the loaves tasted.

I left in the sour cream and a small amount of baking soda, but I also was generous with the baking powder, using two teaspoons. With the amount of bananas and nuts I was using, and because I was making a large loaf (9-by-5-inch pan versus an 8-by-4-inch size), I knew the extra leavener wasn’t excessive.

I thought I had done it — baked the perfect loaf. I took it from the oven and stood back to admire my masterpiece. Twenty minutes later, I returned to the kitchen to find the center caved in like a city street with a water main break.

The noise that came out of my mouth resembled Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football away: “AGHAGHAGHR!”
But when I sliced off the uncollapsed end, I knew I was on the right track. The loaf was wonderful, exactly what I was hoping for. It was just underbaked.

This is where advice from Susan Reid, a chef and baking expert on staff at King Arthur Flour, really came in handy.
Reid told me that quick breads, despite their name, really can take a long time in the oven — an hour or more. Loaves that turn out too soft suffer from too many wet ingredients or not enough baking time. Go lower and slower, she said.

A lower oven temperature for a longer time will help the loaf to bake completely. Foil the top to keep the loaf from overbrowning, she said.

There are a few other basic hints that Reid passed along for use when baking not just banana bread, but any quick bread, such as zucchini, pumpkin, or poppy seed.

• Use light-colored metal pans, preferably aluminum. Dark pans absorb heat and often result in burnt loaves. Don’t be lured by the nonstick finish. Proper greasing of the pan will prevent sticking. Glass pans are worse. Glass will act as an insulator and often burn the bread. An old-fashioned aluminum pan works best.

• Yes, the age of your baking powder and baking soda really does matter. Check the date on the box. If it’s outdated, toss it and buy fresh. Otherwise, you risk wasting more-expensive ingredients for the sake of using old leavener, which is relatively inexpensive.

• Make sure you preheat your oven long enough, at least 20 minutes. Invest in an oven thermometer. Oven temperatures can vary widely and it’s not unusual for an oven to run 5 or 10 degrees hotter or colder than where it is set, particularly an older oven.

I followed Reid’s advice on baking time. In my oven, I had the bread baking for a full 90 minutes — the first 50 at 350 degrees and the next 40 at 325 degrees with a foil cover. For the last 20 minutes, I checked it frequently until my cake tester finally came out clean.

It cooled perfectly and when I sliced into it and took a bite, it was everything I had hoped for. Soft, sweet, nutty, packed with flavor and just a tad crusty on the outside.

Alone in my kitchen, I swear I heard a choir of angels singing, which is why I’ve named this recipe Hallelujah Banana Bread.

HALLELUJAH BANANA BREAD
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Yield: 1 loaf

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped walnuts
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed bananas
1/4 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Procedure:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with nonstick cooking spray.
2. In large bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt; stir together well to blend. Stir nuts into flour mixture until evenly distributed.
3. In separate bowl, beat eggs. Add bananas, sour cream, vanilla and melted butter; mix with spoon or rubber spatula until well combined.
4. Make a well in center of flour; pour wet ingredients into dry and stir with spoon or large rubber spatula until ingredients are fully combined. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan.
5. Bake 50 minutes at 350 degrees, then reduce oven temperature to 325 degrees. Cover loaf loosely with foil to prevent it from overbrowning and continue baking 25-40 minutes, loaf tests clean. (This loaf is large and may require total baking time up to 90 minutes.)
6. Remove from oven and cool loaf in pan on a wire rack until cool enough to handle, about 15 to 20 minutes. Remove loaf from pan and cool completely on a wire rack.