The Best Low Fat Banana Bread

Earlier this week, I bought a basket full of bananas at the market that was marked 50% off. They were looking a little bruised but I figured they will make some mean banana bread when totally ripe. So I let them sit in the sun for days, and today, they looked so ugly that I decided to turn them beautiful again.

Having tried V’con’s lower fat banana bread (which was really good), I felt like trying other lower fat versions as well. And I came across the Almost No Fat Banana Bread recipe from Allrecipes.

After I read all the rave (and some not so raving) reviews on this banana bread, I decided to tweak the recipe a bit following some of the reviewers’ advice.

So here goes my version of the super moist , out of this world low fat banana recipe.

Almost No-Fat Banana Bread (revised from Allrecipes)

yield: 12 servings

Ingredients:

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 ~ 1/2 cup splenda or white sugar (the amount varies to your taste and bananas’ ripeness. I used 1/4 cup and they were still sweet)

1 1/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 whole egg

2 cups mashed bananas (I used 4 medium~large very ripe bananas)

1/3 cup applesauce

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease an 8×4 inch loaf pan.
2. In a small bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda and cinnamon.
   
3. In a large bowl, combine applesauce,mashed bananas, egg and sugar. Mix well.
4. Fold in the dry ingredients to the wet. This is the most important part of the process: do NOT over stir!  Gently fold the batter until just moistened (the batter should not be smooth, it should look too lumpy).
5. Pour batter into the loaf pan.
   
6. Bake in preheated oven for 50 to 55 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into center of loaf comes out clean. Turn out onto wire rack and allow to cool before slicing.

I have no patience to wait until things cool (big problem!). When this banana bread was still very warm, I cut into one and it was looking a bit wet. It was from the large amount of bananas. This shouldn’t be a problem since as the bread cools off completely, it will still cook inside a bit and the extra moisture will keep the bread moist.

One of the major problems with low fat versions of breads were that they became stale very quickly(even in the course of one day!). This bread is so moist that it will stay that way for longer periods.

This recipe beats all other low fat versions. I’m throwing my other banana recipes away!