By Whitney Cole
I am a pretty lousy chef. This is mostly due to my short attention span and my tendency to be an absolute klutz in every aspect of life. Banana bread, however, is a very forgiving subject.
I am going to show you how a culinary-and-monetary-
Behold: everything* you need to make banana bread. Most of this I promise you most likely already have.
*Not pictured: functioning oven, small pan, mixing bowl, banana bread pan (I bought a set of foil pans for less than $3)
This is the recipe I believe I started with a long time ago. It has fallen victim to my last-minute recipe decision-making on countless occasions. I will put the original recipe here, and then explain how I have inevitably wandered from that recipe.
I only had 1 cup worth of flour and not quite a full cup of sugar, so I made some adjustments by throwing in brown sugar and oatmeal. My super official makeshift recipe is as follows:
3 ripe bananas
1/3 c. melted butter
(almost) 1 c. sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt
1 c. flour
3/4ish c. oatmeal
a little more than 1 tsp brown sugar
~Preheat the oven to 350°~
My methods are equally as official.
First, you smush up your bananas. Depending on how ladylike and delicate I’m feeling, I will either use my trusty fork or just my hands. No fancy mixers here.
Take the butter and melt it in your wee pan on the stove. Pour it into the bananas and mash/mix everything together.
Look at that fork action.
Next comes the sugar and egg. I would like to take a moment to talk about the miraculous thing that occurred when I cracked this egg. I cracked it like a champion with one hand, and every unrealistic cooking show dream I’d ever had had come true. It was so beautiful and perfect. Anyway, the original recipe calls for a “beaten” egg, which I have interpreted to mean, “throw the egg in with everything else and it will eventually be beaten.”
Throw in the vanilla and baking soda and keep track of the consistency of the mixture. I have noticed that a mostly-goopy-little-runny consistency seems to work pretty well.
Though I’m sure some culinary student is sobbing at the order in which I’ve slopped everything together, it is at this point I toss in my extra ingredients: brown sugar and oatmeal. Basically, do what makes you the happiest because the order has never affected my eating experience in the end.
Pour in the flour, mix it up, and you’re good to go.
Make sure your pan is greased somehow. Cooking spray is fine, but butter is way more delicious and bad for you, so I’d say go with that. When I have extra flour, I sprinkle that over the buttered pan, but that was not the case this go–around.
The textbook bake time is one hour. About halfway through the cooking process, the banana bread will start to smell amazing. Do not falter. The banana bread is merely testing you. You have to wait the full hour. In my experience, sometimes it takes a bit longer. You want the top to be brown and toasty, and that fork (it returns) should emerge from the center without goop all over it. I recommend also letting it cool, because everything really sets. It is then, and only then, that you may enjoy your banana bread.
Happy eating.
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| Whitney Cole is a tiny Southern firecracker from small-town Virginia She graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2015 with a B.F.A. in Photography. Her work to date has been an investigation of her Southern heritage. Follow her on Instagram for lots of pictures of her dog and trees. |
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