My sabbatical has ended; I’d like to talk about banana bread now.
I make the best whole wheat chocolate banana bread in the world–no no–in the History of the world. If I do say so myself. It might not rate beyond divine in an everyday street/post-football game taste test; I suspect that only extraordinary persons would truly appreciate the supreme nuances of my banana bread. But you can see that Nora loves it. Stray friends and relatives with an affinity for chocolate, browsing through my kitchen, cannot leave it alone. It is, frankly, to die for.
I am not going to simply share my recipe. No, that would be too easy, and way too brief. I’ve been away for awhile; I’m back, and I have things to say. Prepare yourselves for my banana bread ramble. While the story is not as spectacular as the bread itself, it does stray into far flung tangents, culminating in irrelevant–perhaps even exotic– regions. How fun is that.
First I must tell you that I am the oldest daughter of a whole wheat expert. My thrifty mother spent decades of her life in almost frantic domestic research, experimenting with culinary applications of whole grains, particularly wheat. As the first of her lucky offspring, I have had chili, cookies, cereals hot and cold, hamburger patties and buns, cinnamon rolls, pasta, pies, cobblers, stews, meat loaf, and tortillas made with whole wheat. On several occasions, Mom has been pressed into nervous presentations of her craft, suffering the dubious pleasure of teaching skeptical Hostess cupcake/white bread ladies how to make tender, moist, whole wheat loaves of bread. From scratch. My mother makes very good whole wheat bread. Which fact only very recently has lent any glamour to her public character (now that the world has begun to accept once more the benefits of whole grains).
So I know whole wheat. I am a whole wheat sympathizer, even (gasp) a whole wheat lover. Wheat and I are as familiar and uninhibited with each other as siblings, having suffered through ascetic (though memorable) childhoods and unpopular adolescences together. Now, finally, we are both coming into our own. And none too soon.
My banana bread recipe contains whole wheat. It IS whole wheat. It has to be whole wheat; bananas want so much more than the dry spongy blandness of white flour. They demand the companionship of rich, earthy, nutty whole wheat. And also chocolate.
Chocolate now. While I grew up in the bosom of wheat fields, chocolate was a novelty, a rarity. Deep, dark, smooth, utterly bewitching; it is, for me, a world apart from everything familiar and mundane. While it will almost always be found somewhere in my kitchen these days, it resists the status of “staple”. It is not “of the household”. It is not even a visiting distant relative. I cannot stake any sort of claim on it; I can only welcome it as one of my most preferred guests. Let me tell you my version of chocolate’s story.
I think the ancient Egyptians liked it. I could be wrong; they might not have even known it existed. But I think they did; I think they stowed it in their opulent burial chambers, along with other treasures they hoped to enjoy in the afterlife. Anyway, I would like to think they had good taste, though honestly, I am clueless about super-long-ago chocolate and know almost nothing about the reigns of pharoahs and so forth, so let it be written, so let it be done. But this I do know: Modern western cultures owe our abundant enjoyment of chocolate as much to women as we do to early explorers and tradesmen.
Centuries after ancient Egypt, in the magical climes of South America, chocolate had some presence, but its limitless possibilities were at first untapped. Traditionally, it was used in ceremonies by men in sauces and hot drinks (that would be the chocolate in the sauces and hot drinks, not the men), without the benefit of sugar (I’m not sure whether ladies were invited to these celebrations or not). Definitely respectable, arguably exclusive. Maybe a little boring? Far-traveling Europeans brought it home from the New World, along with cargo ships full of other things that impressed or at least bemused them. We must thank these adventurers for their discoveries and selections. Thank you boys. But once in Europe, chocolate languished, forgotten or misapplied in the pantries of obscure monks and scholars. The men—I mean the chocolate—in unsweetened sauces and drinks just didn’t catch. No one had any great ideas about what to do with it until a little gaggle of nuns in a convent got their hands on it. Which I think is so significant. And turns out to be a tribute to the insight and ingenuity of women.
The nuns sweetened the aromatic brown stuff with sugar and pampered it with dollops of cream and butter. The results were no doubt divine. Thus began a long and flowery love affair between women and chocolate. The ladies liked their new creations so well that their administrators (the male clergy) took notice, became uneasy (a common human reaction to the unknown), and forbade the scandalously delicious, endorphin-producing chocolate in the abbey (How DO you solve a problem like Maria?). But somehow, not surprisingly, the priest’s denunciations and prohibitions had no permanent effect on the interminable destiny of women and their new favorite. Heaven, it turns out, does not enforce human embargoes on essential, innocent pleasures.
I am a woman who (like most women) has known a few of the miseries and joys of the cloister (at least figuratively). Of course I love chocolate. And life has taught me how to use it. I remember watching, skeptical, as one of my roommates, an irrepressible, beautiful crazy woman with amazing curly red hair, played with a banana bread recipe in the cramped kitchen of our apartment. We needed an outlet that day–a diversion, entertainment. Each of us suffered from our own flavor of a broken heart, and also from lack of sleep and a tortuous future in either Physical Science (her), or a mortifying reckoning with an intimidating English professor (me). Possibly also homesickness (it came and went). She added lemon juice to the mashed bananas. Lemon juice! Well. Usually, I was the one who came up with unlikely concoctions, but she was on a roll that day, grabbing random things to put in her banana bread and sampling the dough often. She loved dough.
Tangent within a tangent: Once, while some of us stayed up way too late laughing in the kitchen, Cindy shuffled groggily from her bedroom in enormous fluffy slippers, a huge red bow abandoned to the masses of her wild, wild curls (we found her hair everywhere in the apartment, from sinks to bathtub to our food—which eventually ceased to disturb most of us, as it was such a common experience–It is far more disconcerting I think to run across a lone hair whose owner you have never met before than it is to encounter a hair whose owner you know and love). She stood up on a chair to reach another girl’s box of Bisquick, poured some into a bowl and mixed it with a little bit of water, and tromped back to her bed with it, muttering as she went (dough dough dough dough dough). She didn’t remember her midnight snack in the morning.
Anyway, back to Cindy’s banana bread. I didn’t think it could possibly work, especially when she tossed chocolate chips in with the bananas and lemon juice (it brought to mind a cake my grandmother made once, lemon with mint frosting). No way. But in the end, the bread was delicious. I can still taste my surprise and delight, more than twenty years later. Now, when I make banana bread, I usually leave the lemon out, but I am very generous with chocolate chips. I use Guittard (they are the best I can easily get my hands on). Both semi-sweet and milk chocolate, all at once.
And now, besides a quick tribute to butter, brown sugar, and real vanilla, this story is nearly done (whew!).
Butter is good. I like it. So I use it in my whole wheat chocolate banana bread. My sister tells me that unsalted is fresher and therefore tastier, because manufacturers cannot disguise the offish taste of old cream without the usual salt. Brown sugar has rich overtones that white sugar lacks. I like it. So I use brown sugar in places where a rich brown sugar overtone harmonizes with the whole. Like banana bread. And finally, real vanilla is a no-brainer. Always use real vanilla.
The end. Recipe to follow.
THE BEST BANANA BREAD, EVER
(Heat oven to 350, unless you are cooking bread in a large pan, in which case I would advise cooking at 325 ten or fifteen minutes longer)
- 1 1/4 overflowing cups of brown sugar, packed
- 1/3 abundant cup of butter, softened to almost liquid
- 2 eggs, whisked at least a little
- 4 or 5 medium very ripe (very ripeness is important) bananas, thoroughly mashed. Think baby food mashed.
- 1/4 cup of yogurt or buttermilk or sour cream… some sort of sour dairy product, plus a couple extra tablespoons of cream or milk, depending on how tolerant you are of dairy fat in your recipes. I like dairy fat. And the slight sourness is important.
- 1 2/3 c. freshly ground whole wheat flour. Use white (or golden) winter wheat. It has a buttery mildness that trumps (by a landslide) wheat’s potent flavor.
- 1 tsp Rumford baking powder. Rumford is the only brand of baking powder I will use. It is aluminum free; it is also free of that bitter aftertaste so many baking powders have. You can skip this ingredient altogether; I sometimes do if I want denser, fudgier banana bread.
- 1/2+ tsp sea salt. I say + because I sprinkle in just a little more than 1/2 a tsp. Use even more if your butter is unsalted.
- chocolate chips (I use Guittard, half milk chocolate, half bittersweet). I think I use three cups, at least. My banana bread has a LOT of chocolate in it.
- 1/2 c. chopped nuts. Roasted macadamias (salt rubbed off) are divine. So are oven roasted pecans. I don’t always use nuts; sometimes I get distracted and forget. And then regret forgetting; they are very good in this recipe.
- 2 tsp. real vanilla, preferrably the kind a friend or relative brings back to you from Mexico.
Mix all the wet ingredients (including brown sugar) together, except for the butter. Sometimes I use a food processor for mashing the bananas. And I add the eggs last, because sometimes when the eggs hit the sugar directly, something weird happens to the eggs. It’s like the sugar dessicates the egg or something.
Mix the dry ingredients together (flour, salt, baking powder) before adding them to the wet mixture. Stir wet and dry together thoroughly, but not too long. Add soft/melted butter last. I do this so it doesn’t congeal back into hard clumps before I can get the flour in.
Pour batter into greased bread pans, or into cute little baking cups or even into a cake pan. This I think is the trickiest part… how to decide whether to bake large or small. Larger needs to cook slower and lower, smaller does just fine at 350. If you are cooking cupcake size, the bread should be done in fifteen minutes. Larger, deeper loaf size… closer to forty or forty five minutes. Do the knife test to see if the middle is done. When the bread is done, sticky crumbs might cling to the knife (that’s good…you want it moist), but there shouldn’t be a thick doughy film on the knife. Thick doughy film means cook it longer. There you go. The bread (even with the baking powder) will be dense and very moist.
