Do you ever need an excuse to eat banana bread? I don’t. I like to neglect bananas in the hopes that someone will see them and say, “Oh, we should make banana bread with those!” That hasn’t happened yet, so this week, I had to take matters into my own hands.
This recipe comes from the new issue of Cooking Light, and it’s actually a reader-submitted recipe. Ah, maybe one day I will grace those pages with a recipe of my own! Until then, though, I’m happy to make other people’s tried-and-true delicious favorites. (A big thanks to Eileen in Montana!)
If you’re dying to make banana bread and you don’t have overripe bananas, here’s a trick: use fronanas! Frozen bananas left to thaw in the fridge are perfect for using in banana recipes. (I didn’t thaw enough for this, so I used half a cup of mashed and half a cup of frozen-thawed-mashed, and it worked just fine!)
At first I was feeling lazy and thought this recipe would be a big ordeal, but it’s actually pretty simple. Just two bowls and no electric mixer to clean up! Bonus points!!
Ingredients
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup flaxseed meal
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup mashed ripe banana
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (The other night, my mom cleaned our freezer and found big bags of frozen whole pecans and frozen whole walnuts. Who knew?! We thawed them and had, as she eloquently put it, “a shit ton,” so I made her get cracking and that’s what I used in this recipe.)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1/4 cup canola oil
Cooking spray
Method
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Combine whole wheat and all-purpose flour.
Add baking soda, baking powder, flaxseed meal, and salt, and stir with a fork. This is the flaxseed meal I used; I found it in the “healthy baking” section at Kroger; I see this brand pretty much everywhere though!
It was at this point I also realized I had no baking soda. What household in America does not have baking soda at any given time!? Turns out you can substitute baking powder. Use three times the baking powder as baking soda is called for. (In this case, 1.5 tsp baking powder.)
Mash the bananas in a separate bowl add the walnuts, yogurt, oil, and sugar.
Stir to combine!
Add to the flour mixture, stirring until just moist. (Sorry! Hate that word!!!!)
Spray a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray and drop it like it’s hot into the pan.
Bake for 75 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then transfer to a wire rack and remove from pan to cool completely.
Slice into 12 pieces. (Each slice has 212 calories, 9.2 grams fat [0.8 saturated], 4.3 g protein, 30.4 g carbs, and 2.6 g fiber.)
Stop torturing yourself and eat up while it’s still warm!
Hell to the YUM. It’s less greasy than regular banana bread, but still perfectly moist. (AHHH! STOP ME!!!!) While banana bread is a great snack, I had it for breakfast instead of my usual English muffin. Topped it with a little Smart Balance light and ate it with a chocolate banana smoothie…it was a good, good morning.
Have a great Wednesday night!
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