Middle Aged and Living Well

Everybody makes banana bread, as everyone occasionally  has those three bananas that are beyond eating pleasure, but are a key ingredient to the perfect banana bread.  Also, everyone has a favorite banana bread recipe, usually the one their mom or grandmother made when they were young.   All the recipes are  similar, flour, sugar, fat, eggs, bananas, baking soda/powder and spices.  Many others will add chocolate or nuts depending on their liking.

My challenge is I like the taste of whole wheat and oats.  Those flavors send most any breads over the top for me.  But, adding these grains can make any bread dry and heavy.  I like my banana bread flaky and moist (but not wet).  My other challenge is I love banana flavor and I want more banana without having to add banana extract.  So to create my favorite banana bread, I started experimenting.  First thing I did was to roast the bananas before mashing.  That was a big success.  The roasting brought out more banana flavor and seemed to add a richness to the loaf.  The next process was to add oats and wheat to the recipe.  I first replace half the all purpose flour with wheat flour, but the loaf was nice but not nutty enough thats when I thought about adding oats.  So I cut back the wheat flour and added some rolled oats.  I mixed all the grains in the food processor to make sure I didn’t have big flakes of oats.  This gave the loaf the flavor I wanted and nearly the texture I crave.  Some good quality chocolate chips created a near perfect loaf.

I posted the recipe so you can try it at home.  I started with a recipe from King Arthur Flour, and made my adjustments.  So please comment on what you think, and let me know how you altered the recipe to make your perfect loaf of banana bread.