January 13, 2024
Ana-Maria entered the house laden with bananas. At least three bunches, but once you’re at a certain volume of bananas, precision becomes difficult. We stashed them on the toaster oven, which surface they were more than sufficient to cover. Her friend had thought she was ordering six bananas. You can guess what she got instead. So she shared with Ana-Maria, who in turn shared with us.
Over the week the banana proceeded to transformed from the fruit our kids love to open and discard after a single bite, leaving banana remnants stashed around the house for unwitting parents to find in future cleaning sessions, to squishy black logs. Toaster ovens are great for aging fruit, turns out.
But in banana’s case, as everyone knows, it’s not a bad thing. As Caspar Babypants reminds us, they’re not pretty but they’re not dead…they can be banana bread!
Late in the week we became an accidental hotel for some friend of friends coming to town for a march. A woman and her daughter from New Jersey took my office, a couple from North Carolina in the kids’ room, and a grad student couch surfing in the den. Our house full up like this generates a sense of deep satisfaction, like a workhorse pulling a fully laden cart. This is what it was made for. As a place of hospitality, it is an avenue for our family, even the three year old, to take some small part in lovingly tending to the world’s needs with exactly what we have to offer. Maybe what a weary protestor needs most in the evening after the day’s marching is done are the giggles and exuberance of a three year old.
And sustenance, of course. Marching and rhyming slogans are not my happy place, but sustenance I can do. And so, accidentally ordered bananas shared with our friend who shared them with us became an extra long loaf of banana bread for our friend’s friends crashing at our place. What, besides the peels of giggles from a gleeful three year old, hits the spot for tired feet and a grieving spirit like a cozy cake-dressed-up-as-breakfast-food, and the fruit of generous community to boot? It’s almost like manna, almost like flour and oil that don’t run out.
Recipe: Perfect Loaf (cookbook) sourdough discard banana bread (website recipe here).
Modifications
Intentional: I always chop up a few bananas separate from the requisite mashed portion that’s mixed into the oil and sugar. I like the feeling of banana chunks intermingled with the bread crumb. Subbed toasted pecans for walnuts, which we were out of, and used browned butter + the last bit of yogurt to add lost moisture for olive oil, which we were running low on. Plus, the nutty flavor is nice.
Unintentional: You’re supposed to mix some chopped nuts with sugar and sprinkle on top before baking. I forgot to add it before I put it in the oven, the decided to just wait and add when I rotated the pan at the 40 minute mark, thinking it might keep the nuts from burning in any event. But the batter was already solidified enough that the sugar-nut mixture didn’t stick and the sugar didn’t melt. Then, I tried to compensate for the non-melting sugar with a quick hit of broiler, but it went a touch longer than ideal and the pecans on the crest of the loaf darkened a few degrees beyond toasty.
Results: Tasty. I may have mixed in a few too many extra bananas for what the bready-part of the batter could absorb, resulting in a slightly gummier texture than standard. Not that anyone is complaining. I don’t know how much our guests ate, but my five year old had three slices the first day, and it’s disappearing at a fast clip!
[…] but for a little trick up my sleeve. At times like this, there’s one place I go–like black bananas into banana bread, so are old mini citrus transformed into a moist almond polenta cake by former British Baking […]