orange banana bread recipe

I learned how to make Irish Soda Bread when Alice Bently wrote her recipe for it on a paper plate at some kind of a multi day geek party I wound up at sometime in the 1980s somewhere in Michigan.  "Her" recipe is the absolute simplest, and the best.  She emphasised that the only way to mess it up was to put too much effort in it. Yet somehow, I didn't really figure out that this was true of an entire genre: quickbreads, that you can basically put anything into them and it's hard to make a mistake unless you forget the soda or something to make the soda react.  I figured this out working my way through a few of the quickbreads in the Joy of Cooking as well as some internet sites.

Anyway, here's a new one.  We got invited to a Seder where I was asked to make a fruit salad (guess I wasn't very trusted on the kosher thing.)  I bought bananas but didn't use them at Will's request (so our salad was oranges, blackberries & blueberries, which was also surprisingly a good mix.)  A week later, the bananas said "banana bread", but Will said he didn't like banana bread either.  This seemed wrong given that he likes quick breads, but then I remembered he only liked my authentic soda bread, not the sweet kinds, so I decided to seek out a proper quick bread recipe.  Unfortunately, they all called for four bananas, but we had two, but also a leftover orange.  Thus I give you orange banana bread, based originally on Maggie Zhu's Low Sugar Banana Bread and what we had in our house.

Preheat the oven to 350F/170C

• 2 very ripe bananas
• 1 large seedless orange, peeled.
• 70 grams (1/3 cup) butter, melted
• 80 grams (1/3 cup) sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 240 grams (1 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour (mix white & brown)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 60 grams shelled walnuts

I threw the walnuts, oranges (sliced in 4 slices) and bananas into the blender, which pulverised the nuts but made things easy.  I then beat the eggs in a bowl and dumped everything else in there except what was in the blender and the flour, and mixed.  I then stirred in the blender, and then stirred the flour in last.  I greased the bread pan with butter, and I baked it in two 30 minute bursts with a ritual rotation of the bread pan in the middle (probably our oven doesn't need that.)

You have to let the bread cool 10-15 minutes before you even try to take it out of the pan, and then cool further on a cooling rack before you can really slice it, so I cooked lunch AFTER the bread was out of the oven.

Even Will likes it :-)

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Update: this really is not sweet enough if you don't use overripe bananas, which makes it hard to plan to make. Also, I tried substituting coconut milk for the butter and that doesn't work very well either. It's kind of a silly thing to do since the recipe has eggs in it already anyway so is not vegan.