Namibia-proof Banana Bread

Namibia-proof banana bread

I brought two recipes with me to Namibia. I’m not quite sure why, because years ago, when I went to Japan as an exchange student, I carefully packed the Toll House Chocolate Chip cookie recipe only to discover that you end up with a doughy puddle if you try to “bake” cookies in a microwave. I didn’t have any reason to think I would be able to bake here in Namibia, but in one of the advice columns to volunteers that WorldTeach gave us, someone advised that we bring a few favorite foods and/or kitchen utensils from home. So I threw in two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese, a couple of instant yakisoba noodle packages, a rubber spatula, and recipes for Lois’ Awesome Mennonite Pound Cake and Doffy’s Banana Bread.

Lo and behold (rapidly becoming a favorite expression) not only did I find that my apartment-mate has a stove, she also has an oven. Said oven looked like it was going to be christened by me, so I thought it was my destiny to introduce banana bread to Omaruru, Namibia.

I procured the required ingredients with relative ease at our local “Spar” grocery store, let the bananas ripen to just past edible-ness, and set out to bake. The original intent was to contribute something to our school’s Culture Day, so I thought the investment in an ordinary but expensive loaf pan (about $15) was worth it. I considered buying a muffin tin, too, thinking that it would be easier to make individual servings, but the price (over $20) discouraged me – at least until I knew that it was going to be successful.

Mash 3 bananas with 1 cup of sugar. Hmmm, no measuring cup. The oven was warming and the bananas were ripe, so I used a coffee cup that looked to be the approximate size. I thought if I used the same container for the flour, at least those two ingredients would be in relative proportion. Ignoring the little black specks in the sugar, I mashed away. Although the sugar is of a slightly different consistency than what we have in the US, the mashing proceeded apace.

Add an unbeaten egg. Well, the eggs, even the extra-large ones, are not the size of “large” US ones. So with one batch I used 1 extra-large, and in another batch I used 2 mediums. Add a pinch of salt. Done. I can pinch in any language.

Add the ½ cup of melted butter. Butter comes in ½ kilogram chunks here – with Katherine’s help, we figured that this was close enough to a pound, so I just hacked off what I estimated to be a quarter of it. (When has too much butter ever been a problem?) Melting it turned out to be a challenge – the stove burners heated to slowly that I went off to mark some papers and came back to browned and smoking butter. Given the price of butter and the inadvisability of walking into town to get more, I whisked it in. (My apartment mate also, miraculously, had an untested whisk in her kitchen drawer.)

Add 2 cups of sifted flour – uh oh – with a teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda. We had these, but no teaspoons, of course. Used a soup spoon and eyeballed it. I did the coffee-cup-cup routine with the flour, but no sifting. I had to explain to Katherine what a sifter was. I guess if students who are 19 years old don’t know what a sifter is, maybe we really don’t need them.

The good news was that the batter tasted right. When we had realized that we needed to heat the oven, we also realized that it, of course, comes in centigrade. With a little help from my Harvard biology major consultant, we figured out what temperature we should use. The learners couldn’t figure out what I was doing when I stepped outside to flour the inside of the pan and dump the unneeded flour in the sand. “What are you doing, Miss?” (Oooh, I just love being called Miss.) “I’m baking banana bread.” Puzzled looks and some shrugs, but any kind of food is very, very popular around here. “Can we have some?”

So, into the oven it goes. An hour later it’s still pretty gooey looking and, finding a toothpick, I confirm this. Having no idea if it it liquid mush inside or not, I just keep checking and toothpicking about every five minutes. After an hour and half the toothpick seems to come out easily, so it goes to the counter to cool.

It killed me to wait until it had cooled to release it from the pan, but by now this whole process had taken about two hours, so I had a lot invested in this little loaf pan. Lo and behold (!) it slides out without even sticking to the bottom, and it cuts into nice, dense slices. I suppose you think I” going to tell you it was horrible, but it wasn’t. As my sister-in-law Jenise would say, it was the best d….. banana bread I’ve ever made, and I’ve made that recipe probably hundreds of times! I don’t know whether it was the lack of measuring, lack of sifting, clearly free-range eggs (we see the chickens walking around every time we go into town) or the slow cooking time, but it was delicious, if I do say so myself.

However, it was not going to be something we could make enough of to contribute to the Culture Festival. At two hours a recipe (I did get much more efficient with practice) it would take a week to make enough for all five hundred learners. So I kept it until Monday and shared it in the staff room. It was a huge hit. The second time I made it I took it to one of my classes, and one of the teachers said to me, “You’re not going to give that to the learners, are you?!?” (I did.)

During the making of a subsequent batch, I discovered that the Nalgene water bottle Tony lent me had ounce measurements written on the side, and my coffee cup didn’t turn out to be very far off after all. I never did weigh the butter to see how close I was (and I’ve definitely made it without browning the butter!) and I now put in however many eggs I have on hand. I do wonder if our oven temperature conversion might have been a bit off (or maybe the oven is just a little cool), but think that maybe “low and slow” gives it that nice, dense, even texture. It tastes a little different every time I make it (especially the time I forgot the pinch of salt!), but no one has said anything other than “this is the best banana bread I’ve ever tasted.”

Next up: that awesome pound cake!