This Banana Bread is my dream recipe. It’s banana and vanilla forward. It gets extra oomph from grass-fed salted butter, sour cream or yogurt, and a generous amount of kosher salt to really season it without being salty. It’s tender, rich, just sweet enough, and not-too-heavy. Add chocolate chips, warm baking spices, or brown the butter if you want to. But the point of this recipe is that you don’t *need* to do any of that.
Equally important, this recipe does not use a mixer. When I want banana bread I want lazy baking. I don’t want to plug anything in. I want to grab things from my pantry, mix by hand, pop it in the oven, and then I want my house to smell like a bakery. And then I want the banana bread to taste like it came from a bakery. So here we are!
This recipe works with bananas at any stage of ripeness. Overripe, soft, totally brown and speckled bananas will do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the flavor here. But we don’t always have ‘em on hand which is why I developed this to also work with bananas that maybe aren’t quite there yet. Just promise me you won’t use something green. For a deeper dive into this recipe, along with product recs and extra cooking tips, follow along on my Substack, Cooking But Keep It Casual and be sure to subscribe here.
Banana and vanilla forward, with oomph from salted butter, sour cream, and kosher salt to really season it through. Equally important, it does not use a mixer.
Melt the butter + mash the banana vanilla mixture
Prep the flour mixture
Fold remaining ingredients into banana mixture
Bake, cool, enjoy
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