Banana bread with no added sugar [vegan]

Some time ago I stumbled across this recipe for fruit sweetened vegan banana bread, and bookmarked it for a future date when I might have 15 overripe bananas to hand. That hasn’t happened yet, so I scaled the recipe down by two thirds instead.

The unusual recipe involves cooking the bananas down to purée in a slow cooker over sixteen hours. I was impatient, so used a saucepan for three hours instead. The banana purée is the only source of sugar in the recipe, and the resulting loaf is less sweet than common banana breads, with the spices and the caramelisation of the bananas giving it a flavour similar to black gingerbread.

When I bring banana bread into work I often joke that a third of a loaf is ‘one of your five a day’, but with the number of bananas crammed into this loaf it really does make a noticeable contribution to your daily fruit intake.