I have no fears of exaggeration when I tell you this is the best banana bread you’ll ever have. It is is moist, with caramelization from a couple of easy extra steps and no special ingredients; you’ll never want to try another banana recipe after you’ve made this one. You can use sourdough discard or buttermilk in this recipe.

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With just a couple of extra steps, you can turn an average banana bread recipe into one that you’ll make over and over again.

If you don’t intentionally buy too many bananas just so that you can make banana bread, then you probably need a new banana bread recipe. The technique that makes this recipe extra special is cooking some of the ingredients before you add it to the batter. The resulting banana bread is moist, tender, and goes perfectly with a slather of salted butter.

I came across the original version of this recipe from Emilie at The Clever Carrot when I was looking for a way to use my sourdough discard to make banana bread, and that recipe alone introduced me to a banana bread so good it doesn’t need cinnamon. She really leaned into the caramel flavor that the brown sugar provided when heavily beaten with the bananas, and so I thought, “What if I could make it taste even more caramelly?” And so enter the browned butter and caramelized bananas.

All together the caramel notes from the brown sugar, browned butter, and caramelized banana are so perfectly decadent, you will struggle to share this loaf with anyone else. I can also assure you that this

This recipe uses 1-2 more bananas than the typical recipe, at 2 whole cups of mashed bananas. You’ll be cooking them down, so that you don’t end up with too much moisture. If you need help browning the butter, see my detailed description of the process down below.

Why You’ll Love this Banana Bread Recipe too

Easy to make (comes together in about the time it takes to preheat your oven)
A new twist on an old classic recipe
Uses basic kitchen staples (nothing out of the ordinary that will have you running to the grocery store)
Brown butter—always a good sign when this is included in a recipe
It’s an excuse to use up the sourdough starter and brown bananas that have been collecting

Ingredients

4-5 Overripe bananas: Adds flavor and a base for the recipe
Unsalted Butter: The fat that provides moisture and richness to the bread
Brown Sugar: Adds sweetness and caramelization
Vanilla Extract: Compliments the caramel flavor
Eggs: Provides lift and binds ingredients to create a wonderful structure for the bread
Sea Salt: Adds complexity and balances the sweetness and caramel notes
Sourdough Discard or Buttermilk: Activates the leavening agent, and provides a subtle tang to balance the sweetness
Baking Soda: Helps it rise
All-Purpose Flour: Aids in structure and texture for the bread

Substitutions

Overripe Bananas: This is banana bread, silly! No substitutes here. But since you are cooking the bananas and speeding up the breaking down of the starches (ie: sugar), ripe bananas will do as well, just make sure they aren’t still green.

Unsalted Butter: Salted butter can be used here, just reduce the amount of salt added by 1/4 tsp. If you’re in a pinch and don’t have butter, you can use canola, vegetable, or avocado oil, just skip the browning the butter part, and reduce to 1/3 cup of oil.
Brown Sugar: While you can technically substitute 1:1 for granulated sugar, you would definitely miss the flavor that brown sugar brings to this recipe.
Vanilla Extract: If you don’t have enough, you could substitute for vanilla bean paste, or leave out if necessary. Don’t add cinnamon no matter how tempted you may be—it will overpower the caramel notes you worked for by browning the butter and bananas.
Eggs: I haven’t tried flax egg replacement for this recipe, but if you’d had good luck with flax eggs in other quickbread recipes, then it would likely work here too. Let me know if you try it in the reviews, and I can add it to the baking notes.
Sea Salt: If you use table salt, reduce the amount of salt by half. Can substitute kosher salt 1:1.
Sourdough Discard or Buttermilk: The acidic tang in these ingredients provides complexity to the taste that you will miss if not used. However, you can use some whole milk (sour with a teaspoon of lemon juice or white vinegar if you have it on hand), or sour cream substituting 1:1.
Baking Soda: Do not substitute
All-Purpose Flour: Gluten-free flour blend works well as a substitute in this recipe, though the bread does not rise as much and takes about 30% longer to bake

Tips for this Recipe

Save the butter wrapper, and use it to line the pan. You still need to grease the pan, but this is a great way to save your parchment paper, and works perfectly every time.

To get the signature cracked top on your bread, use about 2 teaspoons of softened butter and create a line down the center of the batter before baking (see below picture).

If you use a smaller, 5x9 pan, the batter will take about ten minutes longer, around one full hour to bake.

Browning the Butter

If you’ve never browned butter before, you may feel intimidated, but I promise with a little bit of supervision you’ll know how to zhuzh up an every day ingredient into something even more complex and special.

The process of browning the butter does two things: 1) Cooks off the water in the butter, which means that the resulting browned butter will be about 20-25 grams lighter, and have about 30% less volume than butter that has been simply melted; and 2) Separates the whey, or milk proteins, from the butter fat and toasts the milk protein so that it has a wonderful nutty caramel aroma and flavor (if you’re a food science nerd, this is called the Maillard Reaction, and is the same process that makes perfectly browned grilled cheese so delicious).

If you start the process with butter cold from the fridge, it takes about 8-10 minutes over a medium heat. The trick with browning butter, is that it can go from browned to burnt in a matter of seconds. When I had my home bakery, I had a cookie recipe that I used to make thousands of massive (almost 1/2 lb cookies), and the recipe took a lot of browned butter, so I have had quite a bit of practice, and here is what I have learned:

Use a small - medium stainless steal (not non-stick or glass) saucepan to brown the butter. If you are browning a large amount, then make sure you use a medium-large sauce pan since the butter foams and expands as the water is evaporating.
Once the butter is fully melted and starts to crackle (this is the sound of the water evaporating) watch it very closely. Don’t walk away or multitask or you could miss the window.
Keep an eye on the pan as it is cooking, and rotate it or scrape the sides with a rubber spatula if you notice one part of the pan is browning the butter early.
Use your ears to tell when it is close. Dorie Greenspan described the crackling slowing down to a “polite applause” when it is almost done, and a few seconds after is when I typically remove the pan from the heat.
Another sign it is ready is when it starts to foam and smell nutty, take it off the heat. You won’t be able to see the browning, but trust me it is forming beneath the foam.
If you move the foam aside and can see the bottom of the pan, and nothing looks browned yet, do not fret—the carry over heat from the pan will finish the browning. If you wait a few seconds too long and the butter is turning dark brown, then quickly use a rubber spatula to scrape all of the browned bits into an empty bowl before the residual heat from the pan over cooks it.
Be careful adding any other ingredients to it, if it has moisture, it will seize, and the steam can burn.
Wait a few minutes for the pan to cool before using a rubber spatula to scrape all of the lovely brown bits you can into a heat proof bowl