National Banana Bread Day

Bakers know that to make sweet and delicious banana bread, they need to use fully ripe, mashed bananas. The resulting quick bread is moist and almost cake-like. And while some recipes call for yeast, most don’t. Either way, the finished product makes a tasty sliced snack. Toast it and add butter for an even more satisfying treat!

Bananas made their way west from Asia by traveling with Arab conquerors as long ago as 300 BC, and they have been growing in popularity every since. As it turns out, the banana is the most popular fruit in the United Kingdom, even though they are usually grown in warmer climates such as Asia, Latin America and Africa. India is often named as the largest grower of bananas. From the time bananas started to become accepted and commonplace in the west, it took a little while (several centuries, in fact) for this tasty fruit to be made into banana bread as people know it today. Banana bread was likely first developed and started to become popular back in the 1930’s, during the time of economic hardship in the United States known as the Great Depression.