Cook-ING: Easy and cozy banana bread

Welcome to Cook-ING, a biweekly series where writer Ingrid Doubleday (Ingrid, ING, get it?) shares recipe ideas and reviews, meal prepping tips, dinner party plans, and other fun cooking related tidbits, stories, and snacks. This week we’ll be Cook-ING — or better yet Bak-ING — banana bread!

This week in Cook-ING, I will be sharing one of my all-time favorite comfort recipes: banana bread. During the dreary days of February, I often turn to easy, warm, and cozy recipes to bring me a little joy, and this recipe always delivers. With the mid-semester point almost upon us, I hope this baking inspiration can bring you all a little joy as well.

My mom would make this banana bread recipe for my family when I was a kid. She would bake two or three loaves at a time and freeze them so that we had banana bread ready to be reheated in the toaster oven with butter for an after-school snack (definitely try this sometime, it’s so good).

Banana bread is one of the few things I bake consistently in my tiny New York City kitchen because the ingredients are fairly simple and it comes together quickly in just one bowl. You need the usual baking essentials (see below), sour cream (an ingredient I try to use in other meals for the week, like chili), and super ripe bananas. 

This recipe is adapted from “The Martha Stewart Cookbook: Collected Recipes for Every Day” which my mom, and now I, always use. It’s the perfect simple recipe that can be easily adapted to fit your dietary preferences or to put your New School creativity to use and change it up with some fun flavor add-ins.

Ingredients:

• ½ cup (1 stick) butter, at room temperature, plus more for the pan
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup mashed very ripe bananas
• ½ cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• ½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat your oven to 350˚ F. Grease a 9” x 5” loaf pan with butter.
2. Mix the butter and sugar together until it is light and fluffy. Add the eggs and stir to incorporate them into the batter.
3. Add the flour, baking soda, and salt into the mixture and mix until just combined. Try not to overmix as it will make the loaf denser.
4. Add the bananas, sour cream, and vanilla, then mix.
5. Stir in the nuts (or other add-ins), if using, and pour the batter into your prepared pan.
6. Bake for 1 hour until a cake tester (skewer, toothpick) inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.
7. Turn out on a rack to cool, then enjoy!

Ingrid’s Notes:

I am a big fan of using walnuts in this recipe to give the banana bread a little extra crunch. Of course, if you’re not a nut fan or if you’re allergic, the recipe still tastes great without them. My other favorite add-in to this recipe is chocolate chips. I particularly like the mini ones, so that you just get a little hint of chocolate every so often. 

Another fun variation to this recipe is adding a cinnamon sugar topping or swirl. Combine about ¼ cup sugar with 1 to 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, sprinkle on top the loaf before baking, or swirl throughout the batter as you fill the pan. The cinnamon-sugar ratio is really up to you depending on how sweet or cinnamony you want your loaf to be.

I’ve found that about 3 to 4 bananas (depending on size) is about 1 cup mashed. When my bananas start to go bad, I pop them in the freezer which keeps them in perfect condition for baking and means that I always have bananas ready to go for this recipe. Overripe bananas are key for making a flavorful banana bread — the browner, spottier, and squishier, the better. Green or unripe bananas haven’t had enough time to develop the sugars and flavor that will make our banana bread stronger and sweeter. Perfectly ripe yellow bananas will also work for this recipe; the resulting loaf will just have a mellower flavor.

I usually take my frozen bananas out of the freezer a few hours before I want to bake so that they have time to thaw. If you want to make a loaf of banana bread but you don’t have any overripe bananas, you can put your bananas in a 300˚F oven for about 30 minutes until they are blackened and soft to the touch. If you use this method, make sure to let them cool completely before adding them to the batter.

This recipe is also super easy to adapt to smaller loaf pans or muffin tins. For muffins, fill the tins about a third to a half full (so that they don’t get too tall and overflow) and bake for around 20 minutes — timing will vary a bit depending on oven temperature and the fullness of the tins. If your loaf pans are smaller than 9” x 5,” I’d probably start checking the loaf’s doneness around 30-45 minutes into the bake. 

Banana bread can be frozen once cooled completely; just wrap it well in plastic wrap and store in a freezer ziplock bag. Muffins are a great way to share your baking with friends or roommates or to freeze part of your batch so that it doesn’t go bad if you aren’t going to finish them all at once.

This has been one of my go-to recipes throughout college because it’s so quick and easy. Even when I was living in Loeb Hall freshman year, I would bake banana bread loaves and muffins with my roommates to share with the other students on our floor or with new friends. I still love inviting friends over to bake and have a coffee — I find it’s such a nice time to slow down and find a little peace within the chaos of city life. I hope you find a similar comfort in this cozy recipe!