Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger

Greetings!

I hope you are all healthy and doing well.

Like everyone else on the planet, we’ve been cooking and baking more than usual. Finding all-purpose flour during the early days of the pandemic was nearly impossible (forget about finding bread flour here in Puerto Rico). Now it seems the supply lines have been fortified and I can get all the AP flour I want. So this week, with quickly ripening bananas on my counter I set out to bake banana bread. But I wanted something a little different, and I found it in Molly Wizenberg’s (a terrific food writer) recipe from a few years back. She adds finely chopped crystallized ginger and that takes this banana bread from really good to WOW! It adds a dimension of spicy-sweetness and moisture you would otherwise not get. If you can’t get crystallized ginger, you could sub in ground ginger (use an 1/8 teaspoon of ground ginger for every tablespoon of crystallized ginger; you may need to add sugar, to taste, to compensate), but you won’t get that delicious gingery chewiness. 

You’ll notice the recipe calls for whole-milk yogurt (not low or nonfat); I could not find it anywhere so I used nonfat yogurt. Full fat yogurt will probably give you a more moist bread, but I did not find this version to be lacking in moistness (or anything) at all.

Try this recipe, I think you’ll really enjoy it!

Be well, stay healthy, stay safe.

Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger (Molly Wizenberg)

Makes 1 9x5” loaf or 1 8” round cake

Ingredients:

6 TB unsalted butter

2 C all-purpose flour

3/4 C sugar

3/4 t baking soda

1/2 t salt

3/4 C semisweet chocolate chips

1/3 C finely chopped crystallized ginger

2 large eggs

3 large ripe bananas, mashed

1/4 C well-stirred whole-milk plain yogurt (not low or nonfat)

1 t vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Set a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat to 350F. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan or an 8-inch round cake pan with cooking spray or butter.

2. Melt the butter on the stove or in a microwave and set aside to cool slightly.

3. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, and salt. Add the chocolate chips and crystallized ginger and whisk well to combine. Set aside.

4. In a medium bowl, lightly beat the eggs with a fork. Add the mashed banana, yogurt, melted butter, and vanilla and stir to mix well. Pour the banana mixture into the dry ingredients, and stir gently with a rubber spatula, scraping down the sides as needed, until just combined. Do not overmix. The batter with be thick and somewhat lumpy, just make sure all the flour has been incorporated. Scrape the batter into the loaf pan and smooth the top.

5. Bake into the loaf is a deep shade of golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, 50 mins to an hour. If the loaf seems to be browning too quickly, tent with foil.

6. Cool the loaf in the pan on a wire rack for 5 minutes. Then tip out onto the rack, and let it cool completely before slicing. The loaf freezes well wrapped in plastic wrap and again in foil to protect from freezer burn.