Finally! A Banana Bread That Puts Flavor Over Frugality
Mushy bananas just didn’t do it. It took tahini to make a banana bread believer of me
Nutty, earthy tahini elevates banana bread, and makes a great glaze, too.
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My lifelong love of baking has always had one blindspot—banana bread. It rarely has tempted me. Mostly because it generally tastes of nothing but flour and fat. Perhaps that’s because baking a loaf—at least for my mother’s generation and, to a degree, mine—was an act of frugality, not indulgence. The bread, after all, was born as a way simply to avoid throwing out mushy, over-ripened fruits. Making something delicious seemed secondary.
In my mind, this at least partly explains why so many people started to adulterate their banana breads with nuts or chocolate chips. And thankfully, this seems to have unleashed the creative minds of bakers everywhere. Today, banana breads can be indulgent, found with buzzy ingredients such as salted caramel, browned butter, craft beer, even miso.
What finally got me to add it to my baking repertoire was Milk Street’s own adulteration—tahini, the same rich sesame paste that is integral to hummus. Its nutty, earthy flavor and distinctive bitter notes complement the tropical sweetness of bananas (more on that in a moment). With a fat content of over 50 percent, we use it in place of some of the butter that enriches and tenderizes the crumb, adding flavor as well as fat. It also makes for a luxurious glaze, if you wish to glam up your banana loaf.
Too little fruit is a problem that plagues most banana breads. So we go heavy on the bananas. Two cups of mashed pulp (from four or five large bananas) moistens the batter. Dark brown sugar brings notes of molasses that complement the tahini and the warmth of ground cinnamon.
For this banana loaf, or any other you bake, make sure the fruits are ripe. Green bananas are high in starch and relatively low in sugar. As the chlorophyll in the peels diminishes and yellow overtakes the green, the starches in the fruit convert to sugar and the pectin breaks down. At the point of over-ripeness—when the banana is too soft to be pleasing to eat—most of the starches have turned to sugar and the pectin has left the building. That’s when you know it’s time to bake banana bread.
Dawn Yanagihara
A native of Southern California who, as a kid, spent many summer weeks in her parents’ home state of Hawaii, Dawn Yanagihara studied studio art and French language and literature in—where else?—upstate New York. After graduating and spending half a year trying to figure things out, she realized she was much better at making food than art and preferred to eat madeleines than read about them. So she attended culinary school on the East Coast and took courses in pâtisserie and viennoiserie at École Lenôtre in France. In Boston, she worked late nights and early mornings as an assistant pastry chef in an esteemed French bistro where she learned restaurant baking wasn’t exactly her cup of tea. She then accepted a job as test cook at Cook’s Illustrated magazine and has been in food publishing ever since—as a recipe developer, copywriter, website editor, author, cookbook editor, and food editor. Now living back in Los Angeles, she is still very keen on baking, loves sweets, and is smitten with the food and culture of Thailand. She chooses cocktails over wine, waffles over pancakes, and onion rings over French fries.
