My favourite banana bread recipe: a new twist for an old classic.

Although I normally post cooking inspiration posts, where I tell you a bit about the food idea I had and the ingredients I used, I don’t normally write full recipes with specified quantities, because I’m used to cooking by feel. However, I’ve decided to start sharing some proper recipes as well, so here’s the first one. 🙂

I’m pretty sure all of us know banana bread. It’s a beloved classic in many countries and the perfect way to use bananas that are starting to go bad, so it also ticks off the zero waste cooking box. Personally, I’m quite fanatical about producing as little food waste as possible, so you can check out some of my other ideas for that here. This time I had 6 overripe bananas and decided to try something new: banana bread with sage and olive oil. It turned out extremely tasty, moist and less heavy than usual banana breads, so you should get to try it too! It’s quick, cheap and easy to make, as you just mix all the ingredients together. It’s also a bit unusual, which makes it perfect for when you want to make something very simple, but still want to look like a culinary master (you’re welcome).

Banana bread with sage and olive oil recipe

Ingredients

• 6 ripe bananas
• 1.3 cups (180 g) white all purpose flour (I would recommend using white flour to avoid overpowering the taste of sage)
• 0.5 cup (60 g) of sugar
• 0.5 cup (1 dl) of olive oil
• 1 cup (2 dl) of milk or plant-based milk
• 3 eggs
• 2 tablespoons of dried sage
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• a pinch of salt

Prep time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 1 hour 10 minutes at 180 °C

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 180 °C (356 °F).

Mash the bananas by hand (I like larger, coarser chunks, but you could also blend them smooth with a blender). Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl with a mixer or a fork: whisk the eggs and sugar first, add the banana mash, olive oil, milk, salt, baking soda, sage and flour. Your sage should be ground into powder form, so if you are using dried sage leaves, remember to crumble them with your fingers.

Pour the mixture into your chosen pan and scrape the remains from the bowl with a spatula. Remember to use baking paper or grease the pan with oil or butter to prevent the banana bread from sticking to the pan.

Put in the oven and bake for at least 1 hour and 10 minutes, depending on your oven. This recipe has lots of bananas and less flour, so it yields a rather moist banana bread. You should let it bake until it feels firm when you poke it with a fork, but some batter will likely stick to your knife if you pierce it even when it’s done.

Notes

If you would prefer a less moist, compact banana bread, use only 4 bananas with the same amount of flour. You can also se 1 cup of sugar if you would like it a bit sweeter, because I personally prefer less sweet baked goods.

Since sage has a very subtle taste that goes great with bananas and olive oil, I used quite a lot of it for this recipe to make it more pronounced. However, you can also reduce the amount to 1 tablespoon, if you would prefer it to be more of an aftertaste.

The banana bread recipe yields a decently-sized loaf or a bunt cake, but you could also make it in the form of muffins. I assume it would yield about 8-10 muffins and you should also reduce the baking time to about 40 minutes.

What do you think? Would it be worth a try? Let me know if you ever bake it in the comments. 🙂

Download printable PDF here