Stovetop Banana Bread

When life gives you rotten bananas, make banana bread!

My life is not full of rotten bananas, thank goodness, but recently my kitchen has been.  It appears that the stores and fruit vendors here in Seoul only believe in selling bananas in bunches of roughly one hundred ripe bananas, which I have found quite daunting to consume.  (Naturally this is the essence of hyperbole, but seriously, these bunches are at least ten or more bananas).  I'm not one for eating bananas and Alex tends to forget when we have fruit to eat up, thus when I buy one bunch of bananas they usually ripen on my counter for a few days until I bake them.

But...I don't have an oven.

Baking without an oven sounds impossible, but I conjured up some creative thoughts and did a little web surfing to see if my idea had been tested before, and within an hour I found myself baking bread on the stove.  It worked so well that I had to share my new-found knowledge with my friends at work and try it again to take some pictures and share my recipe with all of you.  Many of you may never be without an over, but on the off-chance that you are without and you find yourself craving a slice of warm, fresh-from-the-stove bread, feel free to give this a try.

First, you should have a recipe to follow.  This is one that I have come up with and have been making for a quite a while.

Banana Bread

1/3 cup Canola Oil

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 cup flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1-2 tsp. vanilla extract

3-4 ripe bananas

*I recommend adding the following, especially if you are without vanilla*

1/4 tsp. nutmeg

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

Next, make some coffee...

...and gather your ingredients.

 

Combine oil and sugar together in a bowl.  Mix well, and beat if possible.  The more air mixed in the better.

I didn't have vanilla, but if you have it, put it in now.

Combine all dry ingredients in a separate bowl and mix.  When dry ingredients are blended, pour them into the sugar and oil mixture and blend well.

When the batter has been mixed, it should look similar to this.  The bananas add a lot of moisture, hence the dry batter. 

Now throw your bananas in and mash 'em. 

When you are done, your batter should look like this.  Try to avoid huge chunks of banana in your dough, for that can weigh down the batter and inhibit it from rising.

On your stove, ready two frying pans by oiling both with some of your canola oil or butter.  They should be similar in size, though if you have one that is a tad smaller, heat that one first.  Notice that only one pan is heated.

Pour the batter into the preheated, oiled pan.

Place the second pan over the first as a lid.  This will serve to recreate the heating style of an oven.

 This picture will give you an idea of the heat setting.  Clearly there are few markings on my stove, so I would call this low-medium.  The goal is to make it warm enough to heat the batter through, but not so warm that the bottom of the bread is burned before the middle is cooked.  Think of a pancake.

Cook the batter like this for 6-8 minutes.  When the batter appears to be solidifying around the edges and little bubbles begin to appear on the surface (like a pancake), flip both pans over.  The top pan will become the bottom and vice versa.  

Cook for another 6-8 minutes.  Use a toothpick in several areas to test if it is done.

When your bread is done, it should look like this.  

When Alex and I enjoy this for a snack or as part of our breakfast, I slice the bread in half - like a sandwhich - and toast both sides in a little butter on the stove.  It's delicious!

Enjoy!