Jeff’s been trying to get to a banana bread recipe that’s a little less cake for breakfast. Not that there’s anything wrong with cake for breakfast.
1 cup (120g) bread flour
1/2 cup (56g) almond flour
1/2 cup (57g) whole wheat flour
1 tsp Kosher salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted then cooled
2 eggs, beaten
6 Tbsp (100g) Greek yogurt
4 Tbsp granulated sugar
4 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
450-475g lightly mashed banana, from 4-5 overripe bananas
2 1/2 tsp (10g) raw sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a loaf pan. (Or line with parchment, or whatever.)
Lightly mash bananas, but don’t pound them to a puree.
Mix dry ingredients together. Mix wet ingredients in a large bowl. Mix topping ingredients together in small bowl.
Add dry ingredients to wet, and stir until combined. Transfer to prepared loaf pan and sprinkle with topping. It seems like a lot of topping, but really isn’t too much; toss it all on.
Bake for 55+ minutes, removing when a toothpick comes out clean. (We’re still working out the bake time a bit; last time we bake for 50 minutes and the center was underbaked.)
The basic idea here is to drive up the protein content and to drive down simple sugars.
To increase protein, we use 25% almond flour, then replace some of the remaining wheat flour with bread flour, with the intent of getting some loft (and protein) from the bread flour’s higher gluten content.
The Greek yogurt also has protein. The Best Light Recipe’s blue berry muffin recipe uses a 1:2 yogurt:flour (by volume) ratio, but going anywhere near that for banana bread seems to yield a distinct yogurt tangyness. Some tasters liked that, but it’s not really a classic banana bread. This recipe winds up with 3:16 ratio.
The current version has a 1:4 sugar:flour ratio (by volume) and a lot of banana. Some tasters report this is a little too sweet, a natural next step might be to dial back the sugar. Note that the sugar topping is intended to produce a prominent sweet note from a minimal actual sugar deployment.
Key sources included Deb Perlman’s ultimate banana bread, and the banana bread recipes in The Joy of Cooking (1997 edition), How to Cook Everything (Mark Bittman, 2008), The Breakfast Bible (Kate McMillan, 2018), and The Best Light Recipe (2006). Also consulted the Best Light Recipe’s Blue Berry muffin recipe.