Duck egg Banana bread
No Banana Bricks allowed!
Ingredients:
3 ripe bananas
1/2 cup softened butter, not melted
1/2 cup white sugar (even better if it’s vanilla sugar, recipe below)
1 room temperature duck egg
1 t vanilla or other flavoring (cinnamon, almond, etc)
1 t baking soda
Heavy pinch salt
1 cup AP flour
1/2 cup bread or cake flour
1/2 cup mini choc chips
Don’t you hate looking for a recipe and having to scroll through ads, clickbait and the author’s grandma’s cousin’s babysitter’s life story to get to the recipe? I do, too, and it’s why I posted the ingredients first. Sure, there’s no context yet, but after reading through this once and seeing how the sausage is made (or bread, for that matter…) you can easily get to what you’re after and not have to scroll every time.
Second part of recipe context…I like banana bread (and what else can you do with bananas past their peak that anyone actually wants to eat…I’m looking at you, flourless two-ingredient pancakes: ew!). I do not, however, like what most people try to pass off as banana bread in the form of banana bricks: dense, moist bricks that are difficult to eat and you can’t build anything constructive out of (see what I did there?). So I adapted this recipe to use my pasture-raised duck eggs and be a nice pastry without being a brick. You don’t need to be haute cuisine trained, either, just have a few tricks up your sleeve I’ll demonstrate below. Preheat your baking device to 350 F or 175 C and peel your bananas (make sure to compost the peels and eggshells - they are great for that!):
Add in the sugar - plain white sugar or even better if you have vanilla bean sugar* and machine mix with the beaters. The sugar crystals help “cut” the banana while mixing in to really pureé it well:
Now, add in your room temperature duck egg-yes, this is important. Cold eggs are easier to separate, but we’re not separating the egg here and the room temperature egg will get fluffier when beaten. In this house, anyone who uses eggs in their recipes must check to see if they are fertilized because of my ongoing hatching projects:
In the words of Devo, Whip it Good! Start on low speed but bump it up and mix for several minutes. You want a very creamy almost froth mix (no bricks allowed!):
Before we get to adding the next bit of ingredients, let’s get the chocolate chips ready. The secret to making breads with things (muffins with berries, chocolate or other kinds of chips) without them being completely obliterated inside or sinking to the bottom is by coating them with flour before adding them to the batter. So in a medium sized bowl, add your choc chips and and a half cup of fine flour - cake or bread flour and stir to coat. This bit of finer flour also contributes to a fluffier final bread (not another brick in the wall).
Now to the bananas add everything else except the chips, the order doesn’t matter and you can add it all and then mix without spacing it out: AP flour, butter, baking soda, flavoring and salt. Mix that well, but no need to spend minutes. Now put your mixer away and get a wide spatula. Add the floury chips to the batter and gently mix in with a folding motion, but don’t overmix:
Scrape the batter into a well greased baking dish (this recipe makes a pie size round bread or a square 8x10).
Bake for 50 minutes approximately, until the crust is golden and just starting to split:
If you succeeded, you should have a nice bread with choc chips interspersed evenly throughout. No brick with the chocolate obliterated or sitting on the bottom!
Happy snacking!
Footnotes:
*Vanilla bean sugar: order a handful of vanilla bean pods, slice them longwise. Scrape the bean paste from the inside of the pods into a food processor with plain white sugar and pulse well. Store in a glass jar with the empty pods standing up inside for extra flavor. You can also make your own vanilla flavoring this way, by adding the vanilla paste to an alcohol base (vodka is the usual, but I prefer a bourbon, which adds more flavors and depth). Add the scraped pods to the bottle as well, the flavoring will get stronger the longer it sits.
