In my house, banana bread is pretty much holy. It’s not around very much, mostly because it vanishes so quickly, and because I’m the only one who bakes it anymore. And not just any banana bread. Irene’s banana bread. Grandma Irene makes a seriously tusch-whooping banana bread, and her recipe is the recipe. It’s dense and sweet and super bananany. Possibly because I tripled the amount of bananas. Yup. Tripled. Awesome.

I’ve tweaked the recipe a bit from Irene’s original, but in my humble opinion, I’ve only made it better. I use butter instead of margarine, reduce the sugar a little, and add chocolate. And that banana tripling I mentioned earlier. I also roast the bananas. I’m usually starting with frozen, black bananas, so the roasting does the double-duty of thawing them out and getting them super, super tasty. It also makes them wonderfully easy to peel—you can just squeeze ’em and they blurt right out.

You can speed up the softening of your butter by cubing it and setting it out on your counter. It should soften in 20ish minutes instead of an hour or so while your bananas roast. Roast those bananas at 400ºF for about 20 minutes, or until your butter has softened. It’s a handy little twofer/multitask/thing.

Irene’s Banana Bread

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup white sugar
1 egg
3 bananas
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda (USA / Canada)
1/2 tsp table salt
1 cup chocolate chips (technically optional, but who am I kidding?)

Roast the bananas at 400ºF for about 20 minutes, until they’ve started leaking some of their juices. Lower the oven to 300ºF.

Cream the butter, and then cream in the sugar. Beat in the egg, and then the bananas. Fold in the dry ingredients, and finish off with the chocolate chips.

Pour the batter into a greased & floured 8×3″ pan and bake for about an hour, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Cool the pan on a wire rack. Slice and devour!

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