James Moffatt
Moist, sweet and full of flavour, banana bread is one of the best ways to use up brown bananas that have been in the fruit bowl just a little too long. It’s also a cafe favourite and may be an excuse to have something like cake for breakfast. Over the years, we have made and tested our fair share of banana bread in The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Test Kitchen and we’re calling it: this is the best banana bread recipe. It’s perfectly moist, with a lovely crumb and chopped walnuts for added texture. In fact, it’s so good you might end up skipping the cafe altogether once you’ve made this at home.
Ingredients
Method
Preheat oven to 160°C/325°F. Grease a 13cm x 26cm (5¼in x 10½in), 2-litre (8-cup) loaf pan; line with baking paper.
Beat butter, sugar and vanilla in a medium bowl with an electric mixer until paler and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until just combined, then mashed banana and maple syrup.
Sift over flour, baking powder, soda, cinnamon and salt. Add walnuts; stir with a large spoon until combined. Spoon into pan; smooth the surface.
Bake for 1 hour or until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean. Leave in pan for 10 minutes before turning, top-side up, onto a wire rack to cool.
Banana bread serving suggestion
This banana bread is beautiful fresh from the oven but possibly even better toasted and slathered with butter, for a completely indulgent, cafe-style experience.
3 tips to make the best banana bread
If you’ve never made banana bread before, or want to perfect your approach for cafe-style banana bread with this recipe, here’s what to keep in mind:
- Make sure your bananas are ripe enough. Banana bread works best with very ripe to overripe fruit as this is when they are at their sweetest and most flavourful for cooking. Barely ripe or ripe bananas won’t have the same flavour and can be hard to mash, which affects the consistency of banana bread.
- Remember to preheat the oven. It’s easy to forget this step in excited anticipation of fresh, warm banana bread, but preheating gives you the best results because it means the temperature is stable. As a guide, it usually takes 10 minutes to preheat most ovens.
- Use the same size loaf pan (or as close as possible). For our best banana bread recipe, we used a 13cm x 26cm, 2-litre loaf pan, greased and lined with baking paper. If you use a different size, you may get different results. For example, a smaller loaf pan could result in the bread mixture overflowing in the oven, while a larger one may not rise in the same way.
How long does banana bread last?
Banana bread last a few days at room temperature or refrigerated, although the moisture content means it could go bad sooner in humid environments. It may also be helpful to keep in mind this guidance from Food Standards Australia and New Zealand: “Generally, unpackaged potentially hazardous ready-to-eat food should not be stored for more than 5 days.”
While this information is designed for businesses, it can apply at home too. If you’re in doubt, throw it out – although this banana bread recipe is so good you might not have any to store anyway.
This recipe was originally published in 2018, then updated in 2023. We updated it in 2024 to include more details and tips.
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