Give Boxed Banana Bread 10X The Flavor With One Sweet And Creamy Mix-In

Banana bread is a food that travels with us through all stages of life. Because of its simplicity, it always has a place in the culinary repertoire. Even when you are making it from a box mix — with or without those mushy brown bananas — there is room for customization and improvement. And one of the best ways to turn a basic banana bread mix into something spectacular is to slip in a bit of instant pudding mix.

There are plenty of ingredients that can improve banana bread, but few, if any, do so as effectively as a pouch of powdered pudding. All you do is mix the powder into the batter before baking, and the loaf will be transformed. The flavor you choose will obviously have some impact on the taste and aroma of the banana bread, but the bigger change is found in the texture. The best banana breads are moist and soft but not mushy, and pudding mix is a secret weapon for accomplishing this to perfection.

Inside those little pouches of instant pudding, the bulk of the mixture is made up of essentially just sugar, modified cornstarch, and flavorings. The science behind this banana bread tip is down primarily to the starch. When it is "modified," that cornstarch is chemically altered to improve its capacity to bind water. In banana bread, this helps seal in moisture and keep the loaf delightfully moist as it bakes.

Adding instant pudding to banana bread batter may be primarily about the texture, but the aromatic contributions certainly should not be ignored. It is a simple way to enhance the flavor of the recipe as well, and depending on the brand of instant pudding, there are plenty of interesting flavors to choose.

There are really two ways to go with instant pudding mix and flavor. The first option is to pick something that will blend right in, adding only a subtle enhancement. This might mean opting for, say, vanilla or white chocolate, which offer a delicate aroma that will improve the banana bread without standing out too much. You can go straight to the source, as it were, with a banana pudding mix to intensify the banana smells and flavors, though some say this can give the bread an artificial flavor.

The other tack is to select a variety that will improve the bread with a standout or contrasting flavor. Chocolate is an obvious choice here, as it is both one of the most popular pudding flavors and a common mix-in for banana breads. Beyond that, though, there is actually a lot of room for creativity here. Butterscotch pudding would lend the bread interesting warmth, whereas coconut would imbue a tropical air. Even something like lemon, pumpkin spice, or pistachio pudding mix could potentially deliver interesting additional flavors — banana bread with pistachios is a thing, after all. 

While there are many different ways to introduce this ingredient, essentially you'll add one standard 3.4-ounce box while mixing your dry ingredients. Remove a little sugar (since the pudding is plenty sweet) and about half they amount of flour as the volume of pudding you add.