Well, when your bananas are black speckled... or wait even longer... if your bananas are yellow speckled (with a black base!)... no, don't toss it! You can now make banana bread! Dying bananas, as I call them, make for yummy sweet banana bread. =) Trust me!
I do tend to cut off the softer spots, but then today's banana seems to be different from the bananas I grew up with. Recently, I peeled the blackened skin off a small bunch of bananas and found perfectly nice looking still firm banana underneath, with maybe one or two soft spots. In the past, the banana inside would be sweet and mushy, with a few excessively soft darkened spots that I would proceed to cut away.
Well, I found a brand new (to me!) banana bread recipe online earlier this year on elise.com. It was a recipe that Elise's friend Heidi had begged from a ski friend's mother (Mrs. Hockmeyer), so we can call this Mrs. Hockmeyer's Banana Bread for (relatively) short! Elise called it a simple but perfect banana bread.
Well, I tried out the recipe as written (using the 3/4 cup sugar option), and it is simple, with the exception of the melted butter (because having to melt anything isn't simple in my book), due to the hand mixing/one bowl/one measuring cup structure of the recipe, however, my resultant banana bread had issues with tiny clumps of white powder found scattered here and there. I didn't like that.
Other than my speckled powder issue, the bread was moist and sweet with a great banana flavor and an interesting texture reminiscent of recipes using glutinous rice flour. The especially dark crust turned out to be a plus, being an extra sweet chewy with a slight crisp (until the bread gets stored in an airtight container) treat!
Banana Bread Recipe
Posted by Elise on Jun 15, 2006
Ingredients
3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
Method
No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.
Source: http://elise.com/recipes/archives/001465banana_bread.php
I baked the bread in 3 mini loaf pans (I feared the batter would overflow 2 pans) for 35 minutes. To combat the speckled powder issue, which I suspect was the baking soda, I think I'll try either try A) sprinkling the powder over the mixture through a sieve (which however sort of defeats the idea of a simple recipe) or B) pre-mixing the baking soda (and while I'm at it, the salt) into the flour in the measuring cup.
But that'll just have to wait for a fresh new batch of dying bananas!
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