Banana Bread

Project Overview

My project involved baking banana bread from scratch. I have always been really hopeless in the kitchen, and the only thing I’ve ever “cooked” successfully has been toast (I know, very impressive). I’ve always wanted to learn how to do more than that, especially as cooking and baking are pretty essential skills to have, so I thought I’d try and start now. My main concerns for this project were that I felt like there were a lot of little tips and tricks and things that everybody knew about baking that I was completely ignorant of, so I knew I’d have to do a lot of research before starting to get the best outcome possible (and not set off any fire alarms).

Reflecting on my Experiences as a Learner

I’ve found that I really learn best with a mix of written tutorials and videos. I really prefer written tutorials overall because it really helps me to have something to refer back to, especially when I’m in the middle of a project, but I also need videos because sometimes nothing can beat somebody visually showing you how to do something. Pictures included in tutorials are helpful, but I’ve often found that (especially when doing something/learning something that has a lot of steps) pictures don’t show the whole story the way a video does. Written tutorials are always my go-to, though, particularly because I can look through them very quickly, and I don’t have to scroll through a video for the exact section I need. Plus, written tutorials are very easy to take notes to!

Guides and Tutorials

I started out by looking through quite a few written “easy” banana bread recipes. Many of them required a mixer, which I did not own and was not planning on buying, so that at least helped narrow down my search. I finally happened on two recipes that I used as my main guidelines for this project, the “Easy Banana Bread (No Mixer!)” recipe from the Dinner, then Dessert website, and the “Our Favorite Banana Bread” recipe from the Tastes Better From Scratch website. I followed the first recipe to actually make my banana bread, but that recipe was extremely vague on what each stage in the process should look like, and also contained a good few typos in the recipe itself, making it a little difficult to follow along. However, it did include some extremely helpful tips for reasons that banana bread might turn out wrong and how to ripen bananas quickly. The second recipe contained a lot of pictures of every step, which I used as a guideline to make sure nothing went drastically wrong. I also used a couple YouTube tutorials to help me with some of the basic parts of cooking, like how to crack an egg correctly and how to butter and flour a pan to keep the bread from sticking. I only realized I needed to know these things because the recipes I was using mentioned eggs, and even though I had specifically bought a no-stick pan I had still seen horror stories from the few cooking shows I’ve seen of people incorrectly greasing their pans. These were quite useful, and while the egg cracking video was perfectly short and sweet, the video on buttering and flouring a pan was well over three minutes which made it a bit frustrating to skip through just to get to the 15 seconds I needed. I also looked at a forum post to find out if substituting powdered sugar for granulated sugar was acceptable. I found the answer very quickly, and it was a short paragraph that explained all I needed to know. The only weakness I can think of for this particular resource is that because the forum post was made by some random site user, I don’t really have a way to verify that they know what they’re talking about, nor can I look at their post history for this website (the website in question is bettycrocker.com).

Problems Encountered Along The Way

I realized right after starting to mix ingredients that I had somehow forgotten measuring spoons and a measuring cup (despite the fact that I know I put them in my cart!). I had with me a ceramic mug and a plastic spoon, so I had to make do with eyeballing most of the measurements, and although I’m sure I got quite close with a good few of them considering the bread turned out quite well, I’m sure it would have been better had I had those materials. I had also mistakenly purchased powdered sugar when the recipe called for white granulated sugar, but luckily (after a quick google search) I found that it wasn’t much of a problem for baked goods as long as I used more sugar than the recipe required. About halfway through the process, I also realized that baking my banana bread was going to take probably double the time I had originally estimated (I thought it would take around an hour and ten minutes, plenty of time for me to bake another type of bread, but it ended up taking around three hours), mostly because I didn’t have access to a mixer and had to mix everything by hand, as well as the fact that I was very slow and took my time, being an extremely inexperienced baker, so I made sure to triple check the recipe before every step.

How Does The DIY Project Connect to Class?

The DIY Project helps us better understand our own research styles and the ways we learn best. This information is both helpful to us, for any future projects we take on (as we know how best to teach ourselves), and for you, the professor, because you know better how the entire class learns and what approaches are best for each individual.

Credits

The recipe I followed for my banana bread was “Easy Banana Bread (No Mixer!)”, written by Sabrina Snyder, a professional private chef. Dinner, then Desserts is Sabrina’s personal recipe website she started to share her recipes with clients she was unable to continue cooking for.

I used a few of the tips and followed along with the pictures from the “Our Favorite Banana Bread” recipe from Tastes Better From Scratch. This recipe was written by Lauren Allen, who creates, writes about, and photographs every recipe that appears on the site.

I learned how to properly grease a pan from Chef Crowley who appeared on the channel mahalodotcom in the video How to Grease and Flour a Cake Pan.

The channel America’s Test Kitchen taught me how to crack an egg without getting shell in the mixture in the video How to Crack an Egg: The Best Method to Crack an Egg Cleanly in a Bowl. Although I couldn’t find out who the exact chef in the video was, America’s Test Kitchen is a large channel with a team of qualified test chefs who are dedicated to creating recipes, testing cookware, and rate-brand name ingredients. They also own and publish in two magazines, Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country.

Finally, I also (quite thankfully) discovered that powdered sugar can be substituted for granulated sugar in this forum blog post on bettycrocker.com, with the question being asked by user bjerke420 and answered by user kolson.