On the Trail of a Banana Bread Recipe

I've had a bunch of blog topics stuck in my queue— my backlog, or backblog if you will— for a few weeks now. I don't have a good reason why. Anyway, here's one from about 5 weeks ago: Baking banana bread!

I have fond childhood memories of banana bread. It was one of the few things my mom would make from scratch. And her recipe, which she said she got from her grandparents— German immigrants who opened a confectionary store in New York City— tasted amazing. It was too bad she only made it about once a year.



So, I got the recipe, let some bananas get over-ripe, and started mixing. ...Oh, wait, not so fast. First I had to get the recipe!

Lost!

I'd copied the recipe down by hand yeeeears ago when I was moving away to live on my own. I made banana bread for housemates in school, and everyone loved it. I made it after Hawk and I got together, too. The awesome thing was how easy it was to make and get great, bakery-shop-quality results. But the last time I made it was over 15 years ago now. While that dog-eared, hand-printed index card made it through a few house moves it got lost in the shuffle somewhere in recent years. I searched high and low for it— including in the desk I've owned for 27.5 years, which is where it should have been. Alas, I couldn't find it.

Family Connection

"No problem," I figured, "I'll check with my mom again." Except my mom is... uh.... Let's just say, I don't think she's cooked anything more complicated than microwaving a cup of coffee in 10 years. I called her to check anyway.

She wasn't answering the phone on the days I called. Sometimes she retreats for days at a time.

Family Connection #2

"No problem," I figured, "I'll text my youngest sister." Our mom lives with her. Sis couldn't find her copy of the recipe, either, but at least knew what I was talking about. Though she disagreed it came from our great-grandparents. She said the recipe card she'd seen had Aunt Diane's named stamped on it.

"Well, maybe Mom copied it off her sister because her mom couldn't find it either," I mused.

Instead she texted me a picture of a recipe she found online she uses.

"I have plenty of other recipes already!" I fumed silently. I didn't want some rando online recipe; I wanted our family recipe.

Hitting the Books

"Maybe it's isn't a family recipe," I considered. It's easy to check cookbooks because we have a shelf full of them. Plus, finding countless recipes online takes all of about 5 seconds of searching. I paged through several examples, both online and off, but none of them seemed like the right recipe. I remember that mom's family recipe had a particular ratio of two ingredients, baking powder and baking soda. None of the recipes I found had that ratio. Most didn't call for soda at all.

Family Connection #3

I wasn't out of options yet. I do have two other sisters. Benefit of a big family, amiright? 😂 I texted my oldest sister.

"Oh, you mean Aunt Diane's recipe?" she responded when I asked about mom's recipe from her mom, from her mom's parents. "Well, I don't have it. But you could call Diane. I have her number here...."

I am not calling Diane, I thought to myself. I don't have time or care to listen to her cry about how her life's been shit since her husband left her. ...Understand, BTW, I'm not unsympathetic about her first husband leaving her. The thing is, it happened in 1981. She's been throwing a pity party nonstop for the past 40 years.

My oldest sister came through a few days later. "Found it!" she texted, attaching a picture of a professionally typeset recipe— the kind you'd find a published cookbook— with Diane's name hand-written on it. So maybe it wasn't my great-grandparents' recipe (unless they paid for professional printing? It's possible; they literally ran a fulltime business based on their baking!) but it definitely wasn't Diane's. It was, however, the recipe I remembered. All the ingredients were there, including the proper ratio of powder to soda I remember. It's the one I chose to use.

Next step: Time to bake!

Baking Banana Bread Mini-Bundts

Several weeks ago I hunted around to find a fresh copy of a family recipe for banana bread I'd lost track of. Hawk and I were doing a baking exchange with friends here and in our neighborhood. I wanted that recipe I remembered enjoying from my childhood— and making in my own kitchen years ago— because it was so much better than others I tried. Finally I had it, although by then it was almost a week into the new year (the exchange nominally being a holiday exchange). It was time to bake!



In the past I'd always made the batter by starting with the liquid ingredients and sugar in a blender or food processor, and then mixing them by hand into the dry ingredients in a large bowl. The old recipe even said to do it that way. This time we had a sturdy kitchen mixer at our disposal, so I used that instead. Though I still mixed the sugar and wet ingredients first, then gradually added in the flour and other dry ingredients.

For the baking itself we took a different direction than a standard loaf pan.



We'd seen mini Bundt pans at a discount store earlier in the week. A) They were cute, B) they were stackable so they wouldn't take up a lot of room in our well-stocked cabinets, and C) they created nice portion sizes suitable for sharing with friends— and for our own consumption as a family of two. We bought four sets. ...Well, we bought one set. Hawk went back and bought 3 more. Hawk still has her mother's habits of "Cook like a squad of Army soldiers is coming over for dinner." 😅

Filling the cups up just past the nub in the middle is the right amount to allow for rising during baking. The timing I had to figure out as I went because there's no particular recipe for this style of pan. The direction of "45-50 minutes" for a loaf pan is way wrong here.



I don't remember now how long the right time worked out to be. That's one of the drawbacks of writing this 5 weeks later. Important little details like that are lost! Next time I'll just have to do what I did this time: start with an initial guesstimate of, like, 6 minutes, then eyeball them for done-ness, then use a cake tester to make the final decision about when to take them out. Oh, and then eat one from the first batch to fine tune the cooking for the next batch(es). 😋



I made two batches of banana mini-Bundt bread that night. Each batch I divided in half and made half with chocolate chips, half without. Both types were great.

The idea of adding chocolate chips is one I came up with myself years ago. The recipe actually calls for using nuts... but I don't think I've ever made it with nuts. Some people are allergic. And it turns out using something sweet like chocolate chips is way better. That's another reason I like this particular recipe: it's flexible. It's awesome without the nuts. It's awesome-r with chocolate chips instead of nuts.