Banana Yeast Bread

The week began the way the weeks begin now: coffee at 5:30 AM in the dark kitchen, Sven at my feet, the lake beginning to show itself through the window as the gray of pre-dawn turned into the gray of full dawn. The silence is no longer the silence I feared. The silence is the architecture of a life I am still learning to live in. I have lived in this house for thirty-seven years. The first thirty-two of them, Paul lived here too. The last five, he has not. The math gets clearer every year and the meaning gets harder. Mamma called Tuesday. Her voice was small but her mind was sharp. She wanted to talk about Pappa, of all people. About the time he fixed her bicycle in 1962. About how he always said "there" when he had finished a job, the same way every time, the small declarative finality. She had not thought of this in years, she said. The memory came to her in the kitchen, while she was peeling an apple. I listened. I did not interrupt. The memory was unprovoked and total. The memory is everything. Erik came over Sunday. He chopped wood for me without being asked — the pile by the back door was getting low, and Erik had noticed, and Erik had brought his ax, and Erik had spent forty-five minutes splitting and stacking and not making a single comment about how the wood needed to be done. He drank coffee. He left. The whole visit was forty-five minutes. It was perfect. Erik is a perfect brother in the specific way of Scandinavian brothers — silent, useful, present. I cooked Wild rice soup this week. The Thursday batch. The same recipe. The soup does not change. The seasons change around it. The Damiano Center on Thursday: wild rice soup, fifty gallons. Gerald helped me ladle. He told me about a regular who got into a sober house this week — a man named Curtis, who has been coming for soup for eight years and who has been sober for forty-three days now. The soup did not get him sober. The soup was there when he was hungry. The soup is the door, again. The door is the chance. I read one of Paul's books in the evening. The Edmund Fitzgerald chapter. I have read it forty times now. The fortieth time is no less affecting than the first. The transmission still gives me a chill: "We are holding our own." Captain McSorley's last known words. The chapter ends with the wreck on the bottom of Lake Superior, and the men still inside, and the lake refusing to give up its dead. Paul read this chapter to me in 1989, on a winter evening, in the living room. I did not know then that he was reading me his own future. It is enough. It has to be. And on a morning like this, with the lake doing what the lake does and the dog at my feet and the bread on the counter and the kitchen warm enough to live in, it is. I have been thinking about the kitchen as a kind of slow-moving river. The river has carried things for a hundred and fifty years now — Mormor's recipes from Uppsala, brought across the Atlantic in steerage in the 1880s; Mamma's adaptations of those recipes for the cold of Minnesota; my own modifications, picked up over fifty years; the small experiments my granddaughters bring home from cooking shows they watch on phones. The river keeps moving. I am one bend in it. There will be others. It is enough.

The bread on the counter that morning was not an accident—it never is. Yeast bread asks for time the way grief does: you cannot rush the rise, you cannot skip the steps, and if you try to hurry it, it collapses. I have been baking this banana yeast bread since my daughters were small, and Mamma baked a version of it before me, and somewhere in Uppsala in the 1880s, Mormor would have known a bread very much like it. The river keeps moving. This is one bend in it. When Erik drank his coffee and left without ceremony, this is what was cooling on the rack behind me—something plain and useful and warm, exactly as it needed to be.

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 35 min | Total Time: 2 hr 30 min (includes rising) | Servings: 12 slices

Ingredients

2 1/4 tsp active dry yeast (one standard packet)
1/4 cup warm water (110°F)
1/3 cup whole milk, warmed
3 medium ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 1/4 cups)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg, room temperature
1 tsp fine salt
3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted (for brushing)

Instructions

Proof the yeast. Combine warm water and 1 tsp of the sugar in a small bowl. Sprinkle yeast over the top and let stand 5–10 minutes until foamy. If it does not foam, start again with fresh yeast.
Mix the wet ingredients. In a large bowl, combine mashed bananas, softened butter, remaining sugar, warm milk, egg, and salt. Stir until well blended. Add the foamy yeast mixture and stir to incorporate.
Build the dough. Add flour and cinnamon one cup at a time, stirring after each addition, until a shaggy dough forms. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 8–10 minutes until the dough is smooth, elastic, and only slightly tacky. It will be softer than standard bread dough—that is correct.
First rise. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, turn once to coat, and cover with a clean kitchen towel. Let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in size, about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes.
Shape the loaf. Punch the dough down gently. Shape into a smooth oval loaf and place in a greased 9×5-inch loaf pan. Cover loosely and let rise again until the dough crowns about 1 inch above the rim of the pan, 40–50 minutes.
Bake. Preheat oven to 350°F. Bake the loaf for 30–35 minutes until deep golden brown on top and hollow-sounding when tapped on the bottom. An instant-read thermometer inserted into the center should read 190°F.
Finish and cool. Brush the top immediately with melted butter. Turn the loaf out onto a wire rack and let cool at least 20 minutes before slicing. It will slice cleanly and hold together once fully cooled.

Nutrition (per serving)

Banana Yeast Bread — The Bread on the Counter, the River Still Moving