Banana Bread

I love banana bread because it transforms a bunch of disgusting overripe bananas into a delicious butterfly of a bread.  I've made many loaves of banana bread, but this recipe is my favorite.  The bread is moist, chewy, dense, and not too sweet.  The riper your bananas, the better.

Banana Bread

Ingredients

• 3 to 4 overripe bananas
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup rolled oats
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt (1/2 teaspoon if you are using salted butter)
• 1 stick melted and cooled, or softened, unsalted butter
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)
• 3-4 tbsp whole milk yogurt (not essential - but gives you want an even moister, denser, tastier bread due to the thirstiness of the oats)

Method

• Place an oven rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 350 degrees.
• Line two loaf pans with parchment paper (I use file clips to keep them in place until the loaves go in the oven - don't forget to remove them).
• Mash the bananas in a large mixing bowl with a potato masher.
• Add the sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract, and mix well until creamy and smooth (go ahead and beat the heck out of them by hand).
• Add the flour, rolled oats, baking soda, and cream together until well combined.
• Fold in the walnuts (optional, but I wouldn't do without them).
• Pour the batter evenly into the two prepared loaf pans and bake for 50 minutes to 1 hour, until the top is golden brown and a toothpick comes out pretty clean.  You can take banana bread out of the oven with a bit more moisture.
• Allow the bread to cool in the pan then slice and enjoy.  Fresh out of the oven, the bread has a lovely crunchy crust and piping hot, moist interior.  The next day, the bread has uniformly absorbed the moisture and the entire loaf is soft, dense, moist, and delicious.  Keeps for 5 days if it lasts that long.

Tips

Banana bread is pretty fool-proof, but here are a few essentials:  use overripe bananas, make sure the oven is 350 in the center of the oven the entire time, don't over bake (it keeps cooking in the pan for a bit even out of the oven).  Each loaf will be relatively squat (you can use one loaf pan for a very tall loaf, but I have experienced the loaf rising over the edges and becoming too cooked on the outside). 

Nutritional Information

Calories are approximately 3,200 for the entire batch, or 1,600 per loaf if you divide by two.  I can get at most 12 slices out of each loaf, usually more like 10 because I like thick slices, for about 133-160 calories per slice.