How to Make Banana Bread with Step by Step Instructions for Beginners - Easy Banana Bread Recipe

today I want to share with you how to make a banana bread with step-by-step instructions for the beginner hi sweet friends I'm Mary and welcome to Mary's Nest where I teach traditional cooking skills from making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time I upload a new video well this banana bread couldn't be easier to make and it's perfect for beginners you really can't go wrong and you're gonna get a nice rise out of it the first thing that you're going to need are two cups of flour and this is very flexible you can use two cups of all-purpose flour if you want you can even use bread flour if that's all you have on hand now what I've got here is one and a half cups of all-purpose flour and a half a cup of whole wheat flour now if you are in the process of making the transition from the processed foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen and you do have some whole grain flours on hand and you have been incorporating them into your baking this is a good time to use some of those whole grain flours and you can use a half a cup or you can use more than that to replace the all-purpose flour the only difference you'll notice if you use all whole grain flour is that your banana bread will be slightly denser and although today I'm using whole wheat flour here you can use any whole grain of flour that you have if you have spelt you can use that if you have n corn you can use that any whole grain flour will work now the next ingredient that you're going to need is some sugar and how much sugar you use is really going to depend on how ripe your bananas are and the browner the skins of the banana the better because the browner the skins the sweeter the fruit now what I've got here is one cup of white sugar and this is just an organic unbleached sugar and I'm using white sugar today because I think that's probably the most common and what most people may have on hand right now now if you find that your bananas are very dark and when you open them up you can always take a little and if they're very sweet you can definitely decrease the sugar you can use 3/4 of a cup 1/2 a cup whatever you think might be appropriate in terms of a good sweetness for your bread and if you are in the process of making that transition from a processed food kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen and you've started incorporating more whole sugars into your pantry you can definitely use that in place of the white sugar you can use the dried cane juice normally sold under the name sue can add you can use maple sugar you can use date sugar any type of dry sugar like that now you can also use liquid sweeteners in this recipe you could use honey you could use maple syrup however if you decide to do that you would have to cut back a little bit on the amount of banana that you put into your recipe when we mash this up we're gonna have about a cup and a half or so of mashed banana and if you are using a liquid sweetener you're probably gonna want to cut that back to about one cup of mashed banana because the liquid sweetener will make the bread a little denser and you don't want to over add too much moisture so to speak to make the bread too moist or too dense and the bananas are adding a lot of moisture and a lot of denseness and then the liquid sweetener is also doing the same so you have to even things out a little but I don't want you to worry you don't need to write any of this down I will put all of this in the written recipe over on my websites the same name of the YouTube channel Mary's nest but there will be a link in the description under this video and it'll be a direct link and it'll take you right over to the recipe that you can read online or print out and I'll include information on all these variations so you'll have all of the options as to whatever ingredients you want to add and what adjustments you need to make next you're going to need a teaspoon of baking soda and don't worry if the baking soda that you have shows that it's expired it may still work in this recipe and you can test it by just adding a little vinegar to a little bit of the baking soda and if it froths up it's fine and it'll work and you can use any kind of vinegar you have on hand including one that you've made homemade and then you're going to want a half a teaspoon of salt and this is just a fine ground sea salt that I have but you can use any salt that you have and then you're going to want 1/2 a cup of chopped nuts and you can use any type of chopped nuts that you like I'm using pecans because I live in Central Texas and pecans are very common here but if you have walnuts or hazelnuts anything like that will work and if you don't want any nuts you can leave them out now I'm including the chopped nuts with the dry ingredients and the reason is it's nice to have the nuts or even if you wanted to some sort of chopped dried fruit it's nice to have whatever ingredient that you add in this category tossed with the flour because that helps them stay well distributed throughout your banana bread or any quick bread for that matter and not all sink to the bottom so now we'll just go ahead and we'll add in our dry ingredients that was our one cup of sugar and again you can adjust that if your bananas are very Brown I have got that 1 teaspoon of baking soda and then the half a teaspoon of salt then the next thing that you want to do is get a whisk of wooden spoons Batchelor whatever you have and you want to give this a real good stir you want to make sure that everything is well distributed that that baking soda and that salt and the sugar is well distributed throughout the flour once you make sure everything's well mixed just go ahead and sprinkle in your nuts and just toss them in the flour or the flour mixture now we're going to set our dry ingredients aside and we're going to get another bowl to prepare our wet ingredients and what we're doing is keeping the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separate until we're ready to mix them and combine them and that's known as the muffin method there are two ways to make quick breads basically two ways and one is the muffin method and one is the creaming method the month' muffin method is what we're doing today and I find this the easiest and the most foolproof because you're just going to have your dry have your wet put your wet in your dry mix it gently put it in your pan and bake it the creaming method involves creaming a softened butter and sugar together and then adding the eggs in one at a time and making sure they're well combined but that can sometimes be a little confusing to beginners to know if they've got it creamed perfectly because that's a very important that it is creamed perfectly in order to make sure that you get a good rise out of your cake you know you don't we're not your cake it comes cake like when you do the creaming method so I tend to think of it a little more like cake you don't want it to be flat you don't want it to sink in the middle you want to also have a nice rise like we're going to get with the muffin method and so you need to really make sure that the sugar and the butter are creamed well and then you put in one egg at a time and make sure that that's well incorporated and that can be a little confusing the when you are a new Baker so I recommend doing it this way and make it easier for you and more more likely that you'll have a success now basically you're gonna need about three large bananas my bananas are a little small so I've got four here and the reason that I used a cup of sugar was these have some browning to them but not as Brown as I normally would like to be able to decrease that sugar to three-quarters of a cup or even half a cup so that's why I use the full cup of sugar now what you want to do is you're just gonna peel these and we're going to just break them up and put them into our Bowl now don't throw these banana skins out and if you know me right now if you've been with me for a while you know I don't like to waste anything but banana skins decompose very quickly so these are wonderful to be used or to throw into your compost pile and if you do a search on the internet for uses for banana peels you're going to find all kinds of ideas one is that you can make a tea out of them by just putting them in some water bringing it up to a boil I think letting it simmer for about ten minutes and then it makes a nice tea that is apparently supposed to help you sleep it's worth a try and other ideas are that you can take this inside of the peel and use this to polish silver I've also read that if you have acne you can rub this on your skin and it's supposed to help with that so be sure to check that check out what you can do with banana peels because there's quite a plethora of information about it all on the internet now if you have a lot of bananas that are turning brown and more than what you would need for today's recipe you can go ahead and freeze them you can freeze them with the peels on or without the peels on I find it works better if you peel them and then put them in a freezer safe bag which helps tamp down freezer burn and freeze them that way that then you can freeze them in the amounts that you would need for this bread or you could freeze them individually if you move thinking of maybe using them for smoothies or something like that but I find having them peeled is much easier when you go to defrost them and are ready to use them in whatever way you're planning if you freeze them with the skins on or the peels on you have to let them defrost a little too to remove the peels and it can sometimes I find become a little bit of a mushy mess but it's it's up to you if you feel that leaving the peels on does protect them a little more from freezer burn that's fine but I usually freeze them unpeel I usually freeze them peeled so now all we want to do is go in and mash these bananas and we don't want to make them a big mushy watery mess all you're gonna do is just take your fork and just start smashing them a little you just want them sort of in smashed chunks and now if you have one of these potato mashes this works great too but a fork will do the trick definitely now for the next wet ingredient you're going to need two large eggs now don't worry if you don't have large eggs if you have smaller medium eggs just use three if they're just form eggs and you're not really sure you can go ahead and use three this is very forgiving just break your eggs and to a bowl and then just give them a little beating with a fork to give them a good mixing so we'll go ahead and add in our eggs right in with our banana and the next thing that we're going to need is a quarter cup of sour cream but don't worry if you don't have sour cream you can use a quarter cup of yogurt you could use a quarter cup of buttermilk you could use just a quarter cup of milk put a little tiny squirt of lemon juice or vinegar in it to help thicken it a little bit anything like that will work and what this does it really helps to create a nice light crumb to your the texture of the of the banana bread it does add moisture but it's it's what it's not quite sure how to describe it it just gives it a nice lightness any type of sort of cultured product like this a sour cream or a yogurt or a buttermilk it always helps lighten quick breads or muffins and I think you'll be very pleased with the final texture next we're going to add in a little bit of vanilla and that's just a teaspoon of vanilla and you can use the store-bought or if you make your own homemade you can definitely use your homemade vanilla here now before we add in the butter we're just going to go ahead and incorporate the bananas and the sour cream and the eggs and the vanilla just to give this a little turn around now I want to talk about the butter if you're if if you don't have any butter don't worry you can if you have ghee or the clarified butter you can use that in this recipe if you want to use coconut oil you can also use that and those do tend to be solid at room temperature so just like the butter here I've got one stick of melted butter you'll want to just melt those so that they are in liquid form however you want to make sure that they're cooled up to room temperature because you don't want to cook your eggs when you go ahead and add it into your mixture you can also use oil if you want and you would use a half of cup of oil you could use a mild flavored olive oil you could use an avocado oil and if you're using an oil you can go ahead and add it right in with all the other wet ingredients when you do this you can just do that in one step when I use a fat that's more solid at room temperature I like to first mix everything else well with the banana before I add in the butter because if I added in the butter right away it tends to sort of seize up a little more and start to become more solid and we really want to be using a fat since we're doing the muffin method and we're not creaming room-temperature butter with sugar as in the creaming method you really want whatever fat you're using to be to stay more liquid so that's why I just like to give all of this a little bit of a good incorporation before I add the butter now we'll go ahead and add in our melted butter and I'm just going to give this a good mix in I'm just going to use my whisk you can continue to use the spatula if you want or wooden spoon whatever you have will work just fine we just want to make sure all of that's well incorporated now before we mix the wet into the dry I just want to mention that you'll want to make sure that the rack in your oven is on the lower third part of your oven and that's going to help your banana bread baked thoroughly but not over brown on the top and your oven should be heated to preheated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and you'll want to have a loaf pan this is just a 9 by 5 standard loaf pan and you'll want to grease it really well with butter and if you have parchment paper you can make a little sleeve like this or a little lifter that you would put into your pan and grease your pan first and then put your parchment paper in it makes it a little easier to give the parchment paper something to stick to and then grease the parchment paper once again and then this makes it very easy to lift the banana bread out of the pan however if you grease your pan really really well with butter it is going to release and come out very nicely now if you're using a different type of fat you can grease it very well with coconut oil or some other oil that you're using but you just want to make sure that whatever you use that it's greased very well now what we want to do is just basically make a well right in the middle of our dry ingredients it's just too like a little indentation then we're going to take our wet ingredients and we're going to pour them right into that well and we just want to get out every little bit of goodness from here then all you're gonna do is very gently start incorporating the wet and the dry together and you don't want to over mix you want to do this with a very gentle hand and all you're gonna try to do is to make sure all of the dry ingredients are coated with the wet or coated by the wet ingredients and just go down and around and scoop up from the bottom to get any flour that's down there and just keep doing this very gently it's really not going to take you very long it's going to come together literally within seconds as you can see and I'll overlay a close-up video so that you can follow along with me as I'm just turning this around just to make sure all of those dry ingredients have gotten wet with the wet ingredients and then we have it it's going to take you about 30 seconds at most then we're just gonna transfer this right into our pan it's gonna be lumpy because we're not over mixing over mixing is the enemy of a quick bread then the reason is when you over mix a quick bread you activate the gluten now when you're making a yeast risen bread you want to knead the bread because you do want to activate the gluten but in this case what's giving the rise to this bread is the baking soda and so we don't want to over activate the gluten because that would make this tough and not a nice tender quick bread so just get every little bit out and then we'll we'll smooth it out and we'll get ready to put it in the oven you can just smooth out the top with your spatula or you can just give it a little shake to get the batter into all the nooks and crannies but that's it you're all set now we're gonna go ahead and put this right into the oven and it'll take about anywhere from 50 to 60 minutes to bake now I recommend that you definitely check your banana bread at 50 minutes everyone's oven is slightly different so your banana bread may be ready at 50 minutes if it's risen nicely and it's a pretty golden brown on top just test it with a toothpick take a toothpick put it in the center if you pull the toothpick out and it's drier it's just got a few little dry crumbs on it your banana bread is ready if it still has a little bit of batter on it the wet batter then it needs to cook longer and it'll probably need another ten minutes now the fact that we're baking this in the lower third of the oven should prevent the top of your banana bread from getting over browned however if at 50 minutes you find that it is a nice golden brown but when you do the toothpick test there's still some batter left on it on the toothpick then you can make a little tent of aluminum foil and simply put that on top of your banana bread and then let your banana bread bake for the additional 10 minutes it will bake through and be cooked but it won't Brown any more on top well I just took this out of the oven and look at this glorious banana bread and the aroma oh you really smell the bananas it just is beautiful now just give it a few minutes in the pan and if you've used the parchment paper it's going to come out very easily we can just lift this right up like that whew wish me luck now if you didn't use the parchment paper but you greased the inside of your pan very well it should the you should be able to this is still a little hot but you should be able to tip your pan over and get your banana bread out without any problem but if you feel that maybe it stuck a little in one of the corners not to worry just take a knife and just go around the edges and that should loosen it now my banana bread took exactly 60 minutes I tested it at 50 minutes but when I did the toothpick test and inserted the toothpick in the middle there was still a little bit of moist batter on the toothpick so I let it go the additional 60 minutes now there's something that I want to say about timing and quick breads quick breads can sometimes take their sweet time and a lot can depend on as I said everyone's oven is different the conditions in your kitchen are different the weather outside plays a role so if at 60 minutes you go to do the toothpick test and your banana bread still isn't ready don't worry it just needs probably another 5 or 10 minutes and if it's on the lower rack hopefully it's not browning too much but if it is you can always do a foil tent and then just check it maybe at 65 minutes or and hopefully it'll be ready if not by 70 minutes it should definitely be ready well I let the banana bread cool a little bit on the cooling rack and technically we should let quick breads cool completely it's still a little warm but I think we'll go ahead and cut it I'm just so pleased with how this turned out and I just want to hold this up and show you and I'll put in a close-up picture as well look at the glorious rise on this this is what I love on a quick bread I love a nice crown to it I don't like it when they come flat I love a nice crown now this has a nice crisp crust I think you'll be able to hear this maybe hear that I really like that but if you like the top of your banana bread to be very soft what you can do is when you take get out of the oven and you're transferred to the cooling rack and it's still warm just cover it with some aluminum foil and that'll make this top very soft well let's give this a slice and I just want you to hear this again there's such a nice nice crispy crust I like that the best what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna slice this end piece and oh gosh look at this gloriousness I'll take some close-up shots but I want to just slice another piece too so you can really get a good look at this bread and as I said I'll take some close-up pictures and overload oh it's quite warm I'm slicing it a little early but look at this beautiful banana bread just perfect the aroma of the bananas is just heavenly and you know if you liked I like to just keep it simple like this but if you do like to add in cinnamon or nutmeg or cloves or allspice you can do that at the point when you're mixing in your flowers you can put in a teaspoon of cinnamon or so on and so forth whatever spice you want to use but I highly recommend trying it this way first because the aroma of the bananas is just heavenly well let's give it a taste mmm mmm that's delicious this is so delicious I had to take a second bite you're gonna love this bread it's flavorful it's so tender and the aroma is just heavenly and it's so easy to make well if you'd like to learn how to make more breads like this quick breads without yeast or no need breads that do use yeast or even advance on to sourdough and be sure to click on this video over here where I show you how to make all different types of breads for you to choose from and I'll see you over there in my Texas Hill Country kitchen love and God bless

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 74,703

Rating: 4.9024706 out of 5

Keywords: how to bake banana bread, banana bread, easy banana bread, banana bread recipe, easy banana bread recipe, banana bread tasty, banana bread recipe easy, banana bread recipe moist easy, how to make easy banana bread, how to make banana bread easy, how to make banana bread at home, best banana bread, best banana bread recipe, quick bread, quick banana bread, how to make banana bread, moist banana bread, banana bread moist, moist banana bread recipe, marysnest, marys nest

Id: PMBnu33fecc

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020