The World's Worst Cook Tackles Banana Bread

If the recipe for Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chip Cookies calls for butter (and it does), don’t use margarine—or worse, Crisco. If you swap the butter for a cheaper substitute, you’ll still get an edible chocolate chip cookie, but you won’t get a great Mrs. Fields’ Chocolate Chip Cookie.

Likewise, when Rachel Ray tells you to use EVOO, don’t use canola oil.  Recipes that call for cream will not taste the same when made with milk. Got it?

Ingredients matter. They can make up for the skill we lack.

That being said, sometimes ingredients are, well, yucky. Overripe bananas and milk with lumps in it make a great cake, but most bakers would not think of using lumpy milk or bananas that have almost turned to mush. It seems disgusting!

Let’s take the bananas first. To make delicious banana bread (or cake) use bananas that are not just black, but soft. Getting the banana fruit out of the peel can be a gooey operation when the bananas are just too mushy to pop right out the way they normally do. And for heaven sakes, make sure that no little fruit flies get caught in the bowlful of mashed bananas!

Now for the lumpy milk. My mom’s original recipe calls for clabbered milk. After all my talk about using the right ingredients, you’d think I’d use clabbered milk here, right? But when my mother or grandma made this recipe, they poured out less than a cup of milk, then added a spoonful  of vinegar. That’s what I thought clabbered milk was until I sat down to write this column. Wrong!

Clabbered milk is raw, unpasteurized milk that has been left in a warm place—a shelf or windowsill-- till solids start to appear in it. Week-old raw milk is best, and it clabbers after 2 or 3 days. The jar holding it should be sealed, btw. I’ve checked several blogs and sources, and the most straightforward instructions for clabbering milk are on eHow.com.

That sounds  even more disgusting than milk-with-vinegar—at least to me. But it turns out that naturally soured raw milk—clabbered milk—is the first step to making cheese, butter, or sour cream. Homogenized milk will not sour this way, because too much bacteria has been removed from the milk during pasteurization. Homogenized milk just goes bad.

So I will amend my mother’s recipe with a footnote.

Banana Bread

Ingredients:

2 or 3 disgustingly overripe, soft, blackened bananas

2 eggs

2 and 1/3 c. flour

¾ c. granulated sugar

½ tsp. salt

½ tsp. ground cloves

1 tsp. baking soda

1 and 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/3 c. brown sugar

¾ c. clabbered milk*

2 T. melted butter

1/2 tsp. orange zest

1 c. walnuts (optional)

*  for clabbered milk, substitute 3/4 c. whole milk  mixed with a teaspoon of white vinegar.

Preheat oven to 325.

Remove the bananas from their peels and mash them in a bowl. Beat the two eggs and add them to the bananas.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, white sugar, salt, cloves, baking soda and baking powder. Add the brown sugar and mix by hand  

Fold in the clabbered milk or substitute. Add the butter, zest and nuts. Finally, stir in the banana-egg mix. Blend all this only enough so there is no dry flour left in the bowl.

Pour the mixture into a greased-and-floured (or non-stick) loaf pan and cook for 45-60 minutes. OR—pour it into a cake pan (again, non-stick or greased-and-floured), and cook for 25-30 minutes.  The bread/cake is done when firm, meaning it bounces back in the center when lightly pressed.

It’s great with a nice light frosting on top. You can also add raisins, drained pineapple, coconut, or anything that sounds tasty with bananas