Avocado Banana Bread Recipe (no oil) - Crazy for Crust (2024)

FAQs

Why is my banana bread crust hard? ›

Baking quick breads at too high temperatures can cause a hard outside crust. Most quick breads bake in a moderate oven (350°F to 375°F). Double check your recipe to see the temperature they recommend. Oven thermostats can vary over time, requiring adjustments by the baker or calibration by a professional.

What happens if I don't add baking soda to banana bread? Without baking soda or a replacement, your bread will be dense and will not rise very much. A small amount of rising can occur naturally, but it's likely that the loaf will be very flat.

Believe it or not, you can make a delicious loaf of banana bread without baking soda that is moist, soft, and fluffy with the help of baking powder! It won't rise quite as much, but it will still be absolutely delicious and tender packed with flavor from brown bananas and ground cinnamon.

You won't get the same result substituting avocado for the banana in any proportion. You might still get a result that you find acceptable and enjoy, but avocado is about 15% fat by weight, where bananas contain almost no fat at all. Avocado also has less sugar.

Simply put, it has to do with the starch in flour. As bread bakes, its outer layer (crust) eventually reaches 180°F. At that point, the starches on the surface burst, become gel-like, and then harden in the oven's heat to a crackly consistency. Steam hitting the bread's surface facilitates this process.

Baking soda works best in conjunction with an acidic ingredient. In the case of banana bread, this may be buttermilk, brown sugar, molasses or the bananas themselves. Recipes generally include just enough baking soda to balance the acidity in the batter.

Therefore, adding more rising agents like baking powder and baking soda will NOT enable greater rise. You need the steam for your baked good to rise. Further, too many carbon dioxide bubbles will eventually collide and break, preventing great rise.

As a general rule, you can use either baking soda OR baking powder in banana bread – both ingredients will make your banana bread rise. While baking soda will react with acidic ingredients in the batter to raise your bread, baking powder can leaven banana bread without the addition of acidic ingredients.

Let it cool for 10 minutes — this helps the loaf solidify and makes it easier to remove from the pan. Remove from pan and cool another 10 minutes. Grasping the parchment paper sling, lift the loaf out of the pan and place on the cooling rack. Cool for another 10 minutes before slicing.

Using too much banana could make your bread heavy and damp in the center, causing it to appear undercooked and unappealing. If you have bananas leftover, you can always freeze them for later use.

What can you use instead of baking powder in banana bread? ›

Cream of Tartar and Baking Soda

Baking powder usually contains cream of tartar, so this is the best swap. To make it, mix together 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and 1/2 teaspoon of cream of tartar. Since cream of tartar is flavorless, it won't affect the taste of your final product, so this is a versatile substitution.

How do I ripen an avocado with a banana? To ripen an avocado using a banana, simply place unripe avocados inside a paper bag with a banana or two. This speeds up the ripening process. Moving the bag to a warm spot in the kitchen can add a further ripening boost.

Banana is beneficial for the health in more ways than one, while avocado is a great choice for people on a diet. Now, researchers have found that eating one banana and an avocado a day may prevent hardening of the arteries that can result in heart disease and death.

People who regularly eat avocado (about a half of one daily, which contains more potassium than a whole banana) are more likely to have smaller waists and weigh less, say researchers who analyzed over 17,000 American diets.

Your first thought might be to blame the recipe for your pizza dough or maybe your poor kneading technique, but according to The Pizza Heaven, the oven temperature is usually the culprit. Pizza that's baked at a low temperature for an extended period will ultimately cause the dough to dry out and therefore harden.

As tempting as it may be to dump all those overripe bananas into your batter, four medium-sized bananas are typically the most that a single loaf of banana bread can accommodate — any more and you're likely looking at a loaf that's going to be dense and heavy rather than soft and moist in the middle.

As the loaf cools, any moisture which is left in the loaf escapes through the crust as steam and this is what causes the softening. You can help to prevent this from happening by reducing the water content of the loaf.

The reason is as you mix, the gluten begins to develop, and when too much development happens, you can end up with a dense, chewy loaf rather than the soft and delicious banana bread you were hoping for.