I was at my local Safeway last week and I saw they were selling sliced banana bread in the bakery section. It was eight slices per package. I couldn’t remember the last time I had banana bread. I hesitated before putting the package in my basket because I wasn’t sure how much I was gonna like it.
When I got home, I ate almost half the package in a whole day. The banana bread was light, moist, and delicious. It made me remember that I enjoy banana bread but it also was a reminder that making banana bread can go horribly wrong.
While this was commercially prepared banana bread, I’ve had my fair share of homemade banana bread. I will preface what I’m about to say and state that homemade baking is lovely and thoughtful. It can be better than anything you buy at the supermarket. Having said that, it’s clear there is a skill to making banana bread, at least in the way that I like it. In some cases, people have made what I call “banana brick”. Somehow, their banana bread is incredibly dense. I can only imagine they’ve somehow used too much actual banana or the banana hasn’t been thoroughly distributed or mixed in. When it’s like this, it feels like less of a bread and more like a compressed brick of banana. While some people might like it like this, the consistency of it is not palatable to me.
As for the Safeway banana bread, I must have not been alone in liking it, because two days after I bought it, I returned to the supermarket and saw all of it had been sold out.