Banana Bars🍌

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Banana bars are a great recipe to use your ripe bananas. A hybrid of banana bread and banana blondies these easy banana bars are loaded with sweet bananas, chocolate chips and walnuts!

Recipe Highlights

• How they taste: Banana bars aren’t quite as dense as banana blondies. In texture, they are a mix of banana bread and the blondie. A slight dense, chewier bite but they are slightly fluffy. The banana flavor comes through perfectly and blends well with the semi-sweet chocolate chips and crunchy walnuts.
• Skill level: Beginner friendly recipe with ingredients you very likely have laying around the house already.
• Storing: These can keep on the counter you like for a day or two. You can also store them in the fridge in a covered container and keep them for possibly 3-4 days.

Ingredient tips

• Bananas: You want to use ripe bananas for the best flavor. Green bananas have a very starch-like, plantain flavor that doesn’t come through well in the recipe. They are also harder to mash. Ripe bananas are sweeter and taste like what we know as bananas rather than the plantain flavor green bananas have.
• Flour: All-purpose flour is use but you can swap this out 1:1 with gluten-free flour or even whole wheat. Note, changing the flour will change the texture of the banana bars. For example, whole wheat flour makes things very dense.
• Brown sugar: You can use light or dark for the recipe. Dark will give a stronger molasses flavor than light brown sugar but they both will provide a great texture. The texture is the reason brown sugar is used in place of granulated sugar.
• Chocolate chips: The banana bars recipe calls for semi-sweet chocolate. But, depending on your sweet tooth, you can swap for milk or white chocolate. I do recommend chocolate chips versus chopping up a chocolate bar. I found the chips provide more of a bang with the chocolate flavor.
• Nuts: Banana and walnuts go great together. But pecans and peanuts also pair very well with bananas.

How To Make Banana Bars

1. First, cream together the sugar and the softened butter. Then, add in the mashed banana, egg and vanilla.
2. Fold in the dry ingredients into the wet. Just before everything is combined, fold in the chocolate chips and walnuts.
3. Place the batter into a parchment paper lined baking pan. Bake for 30-35 minutes.
4. Remove from oven and allow to cool before slicing and serving.

Chef’s tips

• Don’t over-mix the batter. There is very little flour used so there is just enough to build some texture. If you over-mix you’ll build more gluten causing the banana bars to be more cake-like and fluffy.
• Underbaking will not make them more brownie-like or fudgy. They will only be underbaked, that’s it. Allow them to cook all the way and insert a knife or toothpick through the center to make sure it comes out clean.

Variations

• Make it gluten free: Swap out the all-purpose flour for gluten-free flour 1:1. This will not change the flavor at all.
• Add a frosting: Cream cheese frosting is a great option or use an icing like the one in my lemon brownies recipe. You can use the same measurements, just swap the lemon juice for vanilla extract.
• Make it eggless: Bananas are actually a great replacement for eggs in vegan recipes.

How to store banana bars

An airtight container is great. Just don’t stack them on top of each other without some sort of wax or parchment paper in between or they will stick to each other.

How to ripen bananas quickly?

There are a few tricks and one is tossing them in a bag with an apple. Seal the bag and the gases between the two will speed up the process. You can do it without the apple as well.

Another option and the quickest is baking the bananas in the oven. Bake them at 300F for 15 minutes on a lined sheet pan. Once they are black, remove from the oven and allow them to cool before mashing.

Recipes to use ripe bananas

• Pumpkin Banana Muffins
• Apple Banana Bread
• Banana Oatmeal Cookies
• Peanut Butter Banana Bread
• Zucchini Banana Bread
• Chocolate Strawberry Banana Bread
• Cream Cheese Banana Bread

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