One bowl · 15 min hands-on · about an hour in the oven
Banana bread
Three very ripe bananas, 1½ cups of flour, one bowl and an hour in the oven. Moist inside, crackly on top — and below you can make it yours: two loaves or muffins, grams instead of cups, oil instead of butter, no egg.
Ingredients
How ripe are your bananas?
Just right — the recipe as written. Drag to match yours — the sugar follows.
Frozen bananas are perfect for this: thaw them in a bowl and use the liquid too.
- 3very ripe bananas (about 1⅓ cups mashed)
- ⅓ cupunsalted butter, melted
- 1 tspbaking soda
- a pinchsalt
- ¾ cupwhite sugar
- 1large egg, beaten
- 1 tspvanilla extract
- 1½ cupsall-purpose flour
Before you start
Steps
Heat the oven
Heat the oven to 350 °F (175 °C), with a rack in the middle. Butter an 8½ × 4½ in (21 × 11 cm) loaf pan or line it with parchment.
Mash the bananas
Peel the bananas into a big bowl and mash them with a fork. A few lumps are fine — they bake into soft, sweet pockets.
don’t mash it smooth ✓
Stir in the melted butter
Pour the melted butter over the bananas and stir until it’s mixed in.
warm, not hot ✓
Add the rest, but not the flour
Sprinkle the baking soda and the salt over the top and stir them in, then stir in the sugar, the beaten egg and the vanilla.
Fold in the flour
Tip in the flour and fold just until no dry streaks are left — 10 to 12 turns. Mixing longer makes it tough.
Look at the batter: what do you see? — tap what you seeStop here — lumpy is right.
Bake
Scrape the batter into the pan and bake for 55–65 minutes, until a toothpick in the middle comes out with a few moist crumbs — or a thermometer there reads 200 °F (93 °C).
top browning fast? foil for the last 15 min
Look at the top: what colour is it? — tap what you seeGolden: time for the toothpick test.
Poke a toothpick into the middle: what’s on it? — tap what you seeCool, then slice
Leave it in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack. Slice when it’s barely warm. Wrapped, it keeps 3 days on the counter, a week in the fridge and 3 months in the freezer.
The recipe as written
Nothing changed yet — try two loaves, grams or riper bananas above.