My Favorite Banana Bread Recipe - Sally's Baking Addiction (2024)

FAQs

Why are older bananas better for banana bread? ›

Ripe bananas are not only softer and easier to mash and blend into a batter, but they are also sweeter, which is why baking recipes specifically call for ripe bananas in ingredient lists. As the bananas ripen, the fruit converts starches to sugars, making them sweeter and more flavorful.

Cool completely on rack. Wrap and store at room temperature overnight before slicing. (We know it's hard to wait, but your bread will be more evenly moist and less crumbly if you let it sit overnight.)

Mold on bananas is fuzzy white, gray, or greenish—it looks a lot like mold on bread. If a banana smells rotten or fermented or is leaking fluid, it's time to say goodbye. If the fruit inside, not just the peel, is black, that's a sign that your banana is too far gone to safely eat.

Banana bread recipes typically ask you to use overripe bananas so that they're easier to mush. This means it's tempting to toss all your bananas into the mix when you're ready to bake, to avoid food waste. But if you add too much of the fruit into your batter, your bread could turn out mushy, heavy, and wet.

In my experience, using bananas with a dark brown or even black peel for banana bread is ideal, as long as the inside isn't rotten. Key takeaway: As long as your bananas aren't starting to get moldy, infested with fruit flies or beginning to rot they aren't too ripe for baking banana bread.

The best bananas for banana bread aren't yellow; they're black. Or they're at least streaked with black/brown, with just the barest hint of green at the stem. And again, the darker the better: there's no such thing as a too-ripe banana when you're making banana bread.

Metal pans are better heat conductors than glass pans, meaning the food inside cooks more evenly. Most baking recipes for cakes, muffins, cupcakes, coffee cake, banana bread, and brownies call for metal bakeware.

Fill the pan until it's two-thirds full, and if there is any remaining batter, fill up a muffin tin. This ensures you get a beautifully risen loaf instead of a potentially flat loaf in a 9×5. Now that you know the importance of pan sizes, it's time to make a loaf of the Best-Ever Banana Bread!

Wrapped well and stored at room temperature, banana bread will last about five days. If stored in the fridge, it should last a full week. A frozen loaf of banana bread will last up to a year in the freezer, wrapped well with storage wrap and aluminum foil.

On top of that, our body's metabolism is at its lowest in the night. Therefore, one should ideally consume bananas in the morning or the evening and must avoid eating them at night.

Can dogs eat bananas? ›

Yes, dogs can eat bananas. In moderation, bananas are a great low-calorie treat for dogs. They're high in potassium, vitamins, biotin, fiber, and copper. They are low in cholesterol and sodium, but because of their high sugar content, bananas should be given as a treat, not part of your dog's main diet.

Using too much butter makes for a heavier cake with less banana flavor. Using double the amount of butter that the recipe called for left me with a loaf that was dry on the outside and moist on the inside.

You may find banana bread delicious, but conventional banana breads tend to be high in added sugar, refined carbs, and calories. Thus, it's best to enjoy banana bread occasionally as part of a balanced, nutrient-dense diet.

Using too few eggs will make your desserts dense, but using too many will make them rubbery. The explanation for this lies in the fact that eggs are made up of protein. As Fine Cooking explains, when the protein in eggs combines with the protein in flour, they produce the overall structure of the baked good.

1-1/2 bananas: 1 cup chopped | 3/4 cup mashed. 2 bananas: 1-1/3 cups chopped | 1 cup mashed. 3 bananas: 2 cups chopped | 1-1/2 cups mashed. 4 bananas: 2-2/3 cups chopped | 2 cups mashed.

Bananas should be ripe, not rotten. They should be soft and sweet and just a little bit brown on the inside, which translates to a lot of brown on the outside. If you don't want to wait, you can freeze them or you can roast them in the oven (in their skins) to concentrate the flavor and caramelize the sugars.

The starch present in the overripe bananas gets converted into free sugar, due to which they are easily digested. By eating them, the body also gets instant energy.

A fully ripe banana is the most nutritious stage to eat, as the fruit has had time to develop and convert its starches into sugars, making the fruit sweeter and easier to digest.

From starch to sugar

According to a research article published in the Global Journal of Nutrition & Food Science in 2022, this starch-to-sugar conversion is responsible for softening the fruit and increasing its sweetness as it ripens.