Dueling Bread Bakes

Are you making banana bread this weekend?

I'm asking because it seems like everyone's quarantine bananas went past ripe at the same time this week, since five people I know were making banana bread yesterday. I found out because I was also making banana bread yesterday, and when I mentioned it in texts or on social media, everyone else chimed in. My friend Kathryn and I compared recipes, and ended up both using the same one, a basic, easy to follow recipe from the Food Network. Kathryn decided to put chocolate chips in hers, and I opted not to, but other than that we both followed the same recipe.

When we compared breads, though, an odd thing happened.

Kathryn's bread:



is much lighter in color than my bread:



Both of us were very intrigued by this, so we started comparing notes.

Pan: Kathryn used a metal pan, and I used a vintage glass Pyrex pan. I don't have any metal loaf pans, and Kathryn doesn't have any glass ones.

Baking time: I baked mine for an hour and ten minutes, and Kathryn baked hers for an hour.

Cooling time: Kathryn cooled hers for fifteen minutes in the pan, then for 45 minutes on a cooling rack. I cooled mine for an hour in the pan.

Other than those three things, we couldn't spot any other differences, so today we turned to our friend Stacy, a much better and more experienced baker than me and, possibly, Kathryn. (I don't want to say for sure that Stacy is a better baker than Kathryn because I've never directly compared, so we'll just say she's better than me and leave it there.) Stacy offered the following ideas:

1) Different baking times are definitely a factor.

2) Even though we both set our ovens to what we think is the same temperature, our ovens are not precisely calibrated, and there may actually be differences. This never occurred to me, but it makes sense.

3) One of us may have had riper bananas, which would have more sugar.

4) The chocolate chips increased the volume of Kathryn's loaf, so we should have had different baking times. Stacy thinks Kathryn should have had a longer baking time, not a shorter one, which could support the idea that our oven temperatures are a little different, or raises the possibility that mine may actually be a little bit overbaked. (I raised that possibility. Stacy did not.)

Both of us agree that our bread tastes good, but we both live alone, so there are no second opinions.

You'll have to take our word for it.