Why Too Much Butter May Be Ruining Your Banana Bread
There aren't a lot of foods that allow you to feel happy when they've gone bad. Bananas, however, are different. Once they turn that ugly shade of brown and get mushy, it's time to make banana bread. Doing so is a great way to not allow food to go to waste. Although banana bread tastes like a yummy dessert, it's actually pretty good for you. According to Healthline, even a banana bread recipe that calls for plenty of sugar still has nutritional value. For one thing, it always contains bananas, which are full of potassium and vitamin B6. Even enriched flour offers iron, B vitamins, and folic acid. So, in other words, you could do worse with a sweet snack.
Most baked goods, including banana bread, require some fat to make them moist and help them fluff up, per Land O Lakes. A common fat in banana bread is butter. Butter is a great, solid fat that not only helps banana bread perform well, but it tastes good too. You can't get that buttery flavor from anything else. In that case, a little extra never hurts, right? Not exactly. When it comes to banana bread, baking it with too much butter won't give you the best result.
Too much butter
Are you one of those cooks who when seeing a stick of butter is required in a recipe so you assume two sticks are better? No worries. You aren't alone. The Wall Street Journal writes that the average American happily eats about 23 sticks of butter a year. We love our butter and we need it in our banana bread. Still, as the saying goes, all things in moderation. Don't double the butter in your banana bread recipe. Here's what happens if you do:
Insider explains that when doubling the butter in a banana bread recipe, the results are bread that is moist on the inside but dry on the outside. A moist middle is great but having to suffer through a dry crust is no fun. The extra butter also makes a heavy loaf of banana bread. It becomes denser which makes it feel weighed down. You would think when baking with extra butter you'd get banana bread that's extra buttery, but sadly that doesn't happen. It still tastes like banana bread but with some negative side effects. Seems it's best to just stick to the recipe when it comes to baking with butter.