Banana Bread with Chocolate and Pecans
Recipe adapted from Smitten Kitchen’s Jacked-Up Banana Bread
8 ripe bananas
2/3 cup butter, melted
1.5 cups brown sugar
2 eggs, beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 teaspoons baking soda
Two pinches of salt
Cinnamon
3 cups flour
Dark and semi-sweet chocolate chips (Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao and Guittard Super Cookie Chips 48% Cacao)
Pecans, toasted and lightly crushed
Fleur de sel
Preheat oven to 350F.
Mash bananas in a large bowl. Stir in melted butter. Stir in sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle baking soda, salt, and a few dashes of cinnamon over the batter and mix in. Add flour and stir until just combined.
Recipe yields two loaves, but I like to use either a square baking dish and make muffins with the batter that will not fit into the dish, or use two square dishes that are different sizes. Grease the pans you decide to use with butter.
Pour in the batter and scatter the chocolate chips and pecans over the top. Sprinkle a bit of fleur de sel on top as well before baking until done (when a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, or an internal temperature of 200F is reached).
Notes
Banana bread was one of the things that my grandmother would ask me to bake the most. It took many tries to be able to bake banana bread that was not undercooked in the center, but I finally got it right! Whenever I would make this for her I would omit the cinnamon as she did not like it. I would also leave the loaf plain and not add the pecans, chocolate, and fleur de sel on top.
This banana bread tastes best when I use bananas that have developed brown spots and I use a combination of frozen and fresh bananas. To defrost the frozen bananas I rinse them with water and then place one or two on a plate and microwave for 30 second increments until soft. I rinse the bananas and use a plate because in college when I placed a frozen banana on a paper towel the paper towel almost caught on fire in the microwave…
If the banana bread starts to turn to brown on top place a piece of tented foil over it and continue baking. Make sure that a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and that when you poke the bread slightly it feels like it is done.
I have made this before using chopped chocolate or broken chocolate bars, but the bread will spend so much time in the oven and so much of the chocolate is exposed that the chocolate starts to melt into puddles and lose its shape. The chocolate also doesn’t look very appealing and its texture is altered when it re-solidifies so I have switched to using chocolate chips.
The pans that I used in the photos above are from this set of Williams-Sonoma Ginger Jar Bakers. I used the largest size and the smallest size (approx. 9 1/3” square and 8” square). Don’t be tempted to over-fill whichever pans you decide to use — your banana bread will burn around the edges before the center gets baked, and in the worst case you will need to remove your bread from the oven before it burns and the center will be terribly undercooked and you will lose half of your product. :(
I recently acquired a potato masher and I am able to mash the bananas with it much quicker than a fork.
