Banana Bread Recipe
We like to serve this banana bread warm, fresh from the oven or reheated in a toaster or microwave, with butter.
The caster sugar in this recipe can be replaced with an equal weight of brown sugar (2/3 cup, very firmly packed), if desired. Mash the banana well as large chunks of banana will sink to the bottom of the bread when it is baking.
160g (1 1/3 cups) walnut or pecan pieces
85g butter, melted and allowed to cool until lukewarm
300g (2 cups) plain flour
3/4 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
168g (3/4 cup) caster sugar
390g (1 1/2 cups) mashed very ripe banana
2 large eggs (we use eggs with a minimum weight of 59g)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
90g (1/3 cup) natural yoghurt (we use a yoghurt with about 3 percent fat)
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (160 degrees Celsius fan-forced).
Place walnuts/pecans on a baking tray and bake for about 3 minutes, until fragrant. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
Grease a 1.5 litre capacity loaf pan and line the base and sides of the pan with baking paper. We use a pan that is about 20cm long, 10cm wide (base measurements) and 6.5cm high.
Stir flour, bicarbonate of soda and sugar together in a large bowl.
In a medium bowl, stir or whisk together mashed banana, eggs, vanilla, yoghurt and melted butter.
Add walnuts to the banana mixture and stir to combine.
Add banana mixture to the bowl with the flour mixture and gently fold ingredients together until just combined. Don't over mix as this can make the banana bread tough. Transfer mixture to prepared pan.
If you are not using a fan-forced oven, adjust the oven rack so that the top section of the banana bread will be in the centre of the oven.
Bake for about 1 hour and 5 minutes, until a wooden skewer or thin-bladed knife inserted into the centre of the bread comes out without any batter attached.
Allow banana bread to cool in the pan for about 10 minutes. Remove bread from pan and cut into slices to serve, or allow to cool completely on a wire rack.
Store banana bread in an airtight container at room temperature for up to two days. Alternatively, wrap whole loaf or individual slices in plastic wrap and store in an airtight container in the freezer. Individually wrapped slices are great for including in lunchboxes. © www.exclusivelyfood.com.au
Below: Banana bread made with brown sugar.
20 Comments:
The bread looks delicious!!! I love the idea of adding walnuts to it:)
Tried this yesterday, so yummy! Even my boyfriend who normally doesnt like fruit cakes! :D
mmm, am now craving warm banana bread smothered in butter, dont suppose you can send some over?
This is a great recipe and has been a big hit with the family. Absolitely scrumptious both warm and cold.
I made two -- one with walnuts and one with pecans and both are perfect.
can a breadmaker be used to make this?
If you are able to bake cakes in your breadmaker, you could try using the cake cycle for this recipe. A standard bread cycle wouldn't be suitable because this bread doesn't contain yeast and shouldn't be kneaded.
I made this with SR flour instead as I didn't have plain/bicarb on hand, and it still worked out OK. I also over cooked a little but the dark brown crust was yummy. Great recipe. Now my old bananas won't end up in the bin...
Hi Amanda and Debbie,
This may probably sound weird but is it possible to substitute the yoghurt for buttermilk?
Hi Clara,
We haven't tried using buttermilk in place of the yoghurt, so we aren't sure how well it would work. If you do try it, please let us know how your banana bread turns out.
I made this the other day and it was so nice!
I didn't have any walnuts/pecans so I had to leave them out, but it still turned out great. :)
Your recipes always work SO well.
My banana bread turned out very wet, almost the consistency of a cake that did not rise. Could it be because I used slightly more banana, about 415g, than called for?
It does seem like a small change, but if you didn't make any other changes to the recipe, then the extra banana probably caused the problem.
I've made the banana bread twice, carefully following your receipe. However my bread turned out kind of crumbly and it took longer than the 1 hour and 5 minutes, an extra 15 minutes and than when I poked the skew in, batter still came out. My oven is fan forced. Please tell me how I can improve this in the future?!
When you sliced the cooled banana bread, was the centre wet, crumbly or just right?
The bread turned out good, but it had a slight alkaline taste to it. I was wondering whether this may be due to the bicarbonate of soda or perhaps the walnuts (I followed measurements)? If the former, could I use self-raising flour instead and just omit the bicarb?
Thanks.
Did you use all of your walnuts in the bread? If any remaining walnuts tasted fine, then they probably weren't the problem. You could try reducing the amount of bicarbonate of soda to 1/2 teaspoon, or omitting it and using self-raising flour instead of plain.
This is awesome.. I made it the other day for the 2nd time.. followed your instructions to the latter.. no problems at all..!
very nice banana bread and keep the recipes going!
The recipes on this site never fail. It was really yummy!!! I was very impressed!
Hi - I really love your site. Provides me some 'Aussie tastes of home' - as I live in Hong Kong. Thanks so much for sharing.
I notice you have 2 banana bread recipes - how would you compare both of them? I would value some idea of which one I should choose... thanks again.
Thanks
Li
Hi Li,
The banana, date and pecan loaf has a softer, more cakey texture than the banana bread.
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