Best Banana Bread

Wilde in the Kitchen has a lovely banana bread recipe for you all today. She comes from a diverse background of cooking, chemistry, and hip-hop kickboxing and brings a humorous anecdote to each post. When you start reading her blog, good luck stopping!

I start my morning, everyday, with a banana. It could be with cereal, a muffin, pancakes or just milk. The main dish is ever changing, but the banana remains. Unlike some picky people, I will eat a banana at most stages of ripeness. From once it turns mostly yellow (green around the edges is okay) until it is almost overwhelmed with brown spots, I’m going to eat it. There is a line that I just won’t cross, that last banana inevitably turns completely brown. I won’t touch it and into the freezer it goes.

I have several single bananas in the freezer, waiting to be baked into tasty treats. I find that freezing the bananas leads to a creamy texture in the final bread because it slightly breaks down their cellular structure and makes them easy to mash (just be sure to let them thaw in a bowl).

This particular recipe has its healthy quotient bulked up with its use of whole wheat flour and Greek yogurt. I also love to bake them in mini loaf pans, that way your serving looks so much bigger! And if you can’t stop yourself from eating the whole thing, you only had three servings… Excuse me now, I have to go eat a loaf of banana bread.

Makes: 1 loaf or 4 mini loaves

• 2 Eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup mashed bananas (3 very ripe & dark bananas)
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp nutmeg
• 1 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 1/3 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 cup Greek yogurt
• ¾ cup chopped walnuts

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 175°C/350°F. Prepare either one loaf pan or four mini-loaf pans by spraying with cooking spray. If your pans aren’t non-stick, also flour the pans.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar and oil. Add mashed bananas and vanilla and stir until just combined. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Add dry ingredients to the banana mixture. Stir until completely combined. Add the yogurt and stir until no white swirls remain. Add walnuts and mix.
3. Pour batter into large pan or approximately one cup into each mini-loaf pan.
4. Bake for 1 hour for the large pan or 30 minutes for the mini loaves. Once a toothpick inserted off-center comes out clean, remove from oven and allow to sit on a wire rack until cooled.  Pop them out of your loaf pan(s) and serve warm (or allow to cool entirely, wrap in plastic wrap, and feed to your coworkers).

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