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I’m never one to shy away from a competition, so when my roommate in college challenged me to a banana bread bake-off (due to the excessive amount of spotty, overripe bananas we’d somehow amassed), I immediately agreed. The next order of business? Get my hands on a winning recipe ASAP.

I began polling my family and friends on their favorite banana bread recipes in hopes there’d be an obvious pick — one incredible recipe that everyone said was their favorite. I had no such luck. My twin sister voted for Cook’s Illustrated’s banana bread, in which you microwave the bananas, drain them, and reduce the liquid to intensify the banana flavor. She claimed it was worth the extra 25 steps, but I wasn’t convinced.

My mom voted for an old family friend’s recipe from a cookbook compiled by my elementary school. But the bake-off was scheduled for that evening — and I could picture that old spiral-bound cookbook buried deep in a pile in the basement — so I knew I didn’t have time for her to hunt it down.

But then, my older sister pitched her suggestion with such enthusiasm that I was sold on making it before even looking at the recipe. A banana bread from Averie Cooks, she claimed, was the best quick bread she’d ever made: moist, fluffy, and packed with banana flavor. When I got to the store and looked at the recipe, the first thing I noticed wasn’t the decadent brown butter glaze or perfectly golden exterior — it was the addition of vanilla pudding mix in the ingredient list.

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