Friday, July 16, 2010

Best Banana Bread Evuh!

I have a confession. I have never cared much for banana bread. Weird, right? I mean, it's not like I thought it was disgusting or anything like that. Just didn't seem worth the calories to me. However, in my new chapter of life, I consider it a personal failure to waste food. :-D I have more time to manage all of this stuff, so I should be on top of it, right? SO when I noticed some bananas looking a little less than perfect for raw consumption, I was determined to find a way to make a recipe I would enjoy. I've been experimenting a lot lately with baking with fat free sour cream (to add moisture without tons of fat) and sugar free vanilla pudding mix (to brighten up flavor with almost zero additional calories or fat.) I can get away with less oil and butter this way, but still end up with something I'm proud to serve. SO--with that in mind, here is the recipe I ended up with, and I must say--it is DELECTABLE! Super moist and full of flavor. And this recipe has only 236 calories and 5 grams of fat, but also 3 grams of fiber and 4 grams of protein per serving. (One serving equals 1/8 of a "regular" loaf or 1/4 of a mini loaf.) You could probably reduce the fat and calories further by replacing 2 of the eggs with 3 egg whites, but I haven't tried that yet, so didn't want to post it until I tried it. Here you go: Enjoy!

Ingredients:
Directions:
  1. Preheat oven to 325°F.
  2. Mix oil, eggs, sour cream and mashed bananas.
  3. Combine remaining ingredients and add to banana mixture.
  4. Grease and flour pans (either 2- 9x5x3 inch pans or 4 mini loaf pans) and place on baking sheet.
  5. Bake 45 minutes for mini loaves or 1 hour for regular loaves (or until bread tests done.)

1 comment:

Jen said...

Sounds yummy. I'll have to share this with Beau - he's our primary baker of banana bread.

A couple of other ways to save on fat but add moisture is to use yogurt or applesauce. We made some blueberry muffins this weekend that called for yogurt, but because of Beau's milk intolerance we used applesauce instead. You can use it to substitute oil, but I've found that you should only use about half of the quantity called for. For instance, 1/2 cup oil will be 1/4 cup applesauce.