Buckwheat Banana Bread (optionally gluten-free!)

[brooksmoses]

So this has come up in a number of contexts and I figured I might as well just globally post the recipe once for everyone.

This is the canonical banana bread of my people, or at least of me -- it's what my mom always made when I was a child, and generally what I still make today. The recipe card I copied it off of says that it's from Southern Living magazine, probably in the late 1970s or very early 1980s; it has accreted annotations since then.

• 1/2 cup butter, softened


• 1 1/3 cups sugar


• 2 eggs


• 1/4 cup sour cream


• 2 T milk (or rum; the original lists rum as the preferred variant, but I always use milk)


• 1 t almond extract (there is an annotation from my mom that this is not optional)


• 1 1/2 cups buckwheat flour


• 1/4 cup plain flour, or additional buckwheat flour if doing gluten-free


• 1 1/2 t baking powder


• 1/2 t baking soda


• 1/4 t salt


• 1 cup mashed overripe bananas (this is about 2 average bananas)


• 1 1/2 cups chopped pecans (the orignal says these are optional; my mom disagrees)

In your largest mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together thoroughly. Add liquid ingredients (eggs, sour cream, milk, almond extract) and mix well.

In your second-largest mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Add these to the butter/sugar/liquid bown a bit at a time, alternating with some of the mashed bananas, and mixing well after each addition. Stir in the optional pecans.

Pour the batter into a greased 9-inch loafpan or thereabouts, and bake at 325 degrees until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. The recipe claims that this will be done in an hour and ten minutes, but it always takes longer than that for me. If baked in a cake tin because there is no loaf pan handy, it will be done in 45-50 minutes or so. There's also a suggestion to cover with foil after half-done baking to prevent overbrowning; whether this is actually useful will depend on your oven.

The bread will be a bit crumbly if you use no wheat flour at all, but only a bit.

Comments

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I'm always looking for more ways to use yummy buckwheat flour.

[whispercricket]

This recipe had me at the addition of rum. Awesome! :)

[whispercricket]

Wow, just made this (with a few adjustments - probably blasphemy, I know :)) and it was amazingly good!

- used just under 1/2 cup Sucanat and a little over 1/4 cup maple syrup - next time I think I'll try 1/3 and 1/3 (I don't like extra sweet bread, although that might be cutting the sugar a little too much, not sure)
- all buckwheat flour - ended up adding 2-3 extra tablespoons on the batter at the end because I was worried it might be too runny (from the maple syrup)
- rum! and almond extract
- no pecans

Ended up baking it just around an hour (our oven runs hot). I'm wondering if the maple syrup helps deal with the crumbliness? I didn't find it any worse than my previous standard recipe, although it's possible that I'm used to crumbly bread (as long as it's also moist, which this was).

Katie says "I ate mine all gone!"