Peanut Butter Banana Bread

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

Bananas and peanut butter are the perfect combination of salty and sweet. After you bake this banana bread the first time, you will wonder why you didn’t make it with peanut butter sooner. It’s just that good.

This banana nut bread recipe calls for crunchy peanut butter. It is a way to add nuts without having to chop them. They end up evenly distributed throughout the bread, so there are nuts in each slice. 

The fastest part of all quick bread recipes is making the batter.  Even though the bake time is over an hour, the active time when you are stirring the ingredients together and pouring everything into the pan is a fraction of that.

This banana bread freezes really well. You can store individual slices in the freezer and thaw them one by one, as you want to eat them. 

The Ingredients

This is what you need:

• Peanut butter: Use natural peanut butter for the recipe. Just make sure it is well stirred, so the oil and ground nuts are completely combined.
• Bananas: It is important that the bananas are very ripe. They should be fragrant and have lots of brown specks on their peels. I like to keep ripe bananas in the freezer, so then I can make a loaf whenever. Thaw the frozen bananas (in their skins) in the microwave when you are ready to use them. Frozen bananas will stay good for 2-3 months.
• Flour: The recipe calls for all-purpose flour.
• Sugar: Besides ripe bananas, the bread is sweetened with granulated sugar.
• Baking soda is the leavening agent that helps the loaf rise.
• Salt, in every recipe, no matter if it’s sweet or savory, brings out the overall flavors.
• Vegetable oil makes the banana bread moist. Use one that is neutral in taste such as canola oil, grapeseed oil or sunflower oil. I like to buy brands that are GMO free.
• Eggs: There are 2 large eggs in the recipe.
• Milk: You can use cow’s milk or oat milk depending on your dietary preference and if you want it to be dairy-free.
• Salted roasted peanuts that are chopped decorate the top of the loaf. You sprinkle them on before it goes into the oven.

How To Ripen Bananas Fast

Most of the time bananas at the grocery are under ripe or are at the early stages of ripeness. Instead of waiting days for them to ripen, you can do it in the oven:

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F.
2. Place the unpeeled bananas, without overlapping, on a parchment paper-lined sheet pan.
3. Bake for 30 minutes until the bananas are soft and the peels turn black.
4. Let the bananas cool for 15-20 minutes.
5. Use a pair of scissors or a knife to cut one end of each peel. Then squeeze out the banana and mash with a fork.

Serving

One of the best things about banana bread is that you can enjoy it pretty much anytime of the day. It’s wonderful for breakfast, a morning or afternoon snack and even dessert.

Storage & Freezing

You can keep the bread in an airtight container at room temperature up to 3 days. Wait to slice it until you are ready to eat it. Since banana bread is so moist, it won’t last longer than this before it goes bad.

If you are going to freeze it, go ahead and slice the loaf. You can freeze the individual slices on a lined sheet pan before you put them together in a container. Or put pieces of wax paper or parchment between the slices when you freeze them, so they don’t stick together.

Recipe Tips

• Always use ripe bananas. This is essential if you want to bake the best banana bread possible.
• Don’t over mix the batter. When you combine the wet and dry ingredients, stir very slowly, folding the batter onto itself until you no longer see any flour. 
• Keep an eye on the loaf as it bakes. You don’t want to over bake or under bake it. The top should turn a deep golden brown and a toothpick stuck into the bread should come out with a few crumbs. If the nuts decorating the loaf are browning too quickly, loosely drape a piece of aluminum foil over it.