If You Like Banana Bread, You'll Love These Pancakes

As a food editor and former chef, I love to feed people. Every single person who steps into my home is immediately greeted with a snack or a beverage, and I am constantly foisting cakes, cookies, and breads on my neighbors. Feeding others has always been my love language—and when it was time to start my baby, Lindsay, on solids, I channeled all my spare time and energy into making him the most delicious meals.

I spent weekends preparing tender matzo balls, miso-marinated black cod, and the silkiest mashed potatoes. I whipped up creamy chocolate avocado mousse, three-ingredient mac and cheese, and chicken piccata. Lindsay’s favorite meal, though, is a pile of fluffy banana bread pancakes and a side of crispy bacon. Made with mashed ripe bananas and speckled with toasted walnuts, these banana bread pancakes are tender, moist, and taste remarkably like the classic snacking cake. 

To make banana bread pancakes—as opposed to banana pancakes—I mash bananas and fold them into the pancake batter like you'd do for the quick bread rather than simply slicing bananas into the batter. The pancakes get plenty of natural sweetness from the bananas, but a teaspoon of vanilla extract and a tablespoon of dark brown sugar helps enhance their flavor. To ensure the bananas are as sweet as can be, I use a clever trick that former Serious Eats editor Stella Parks swears by: I mash the fruit with an egg. Egg yolks contain amylase, an enzyme that turns starches into the liquid sugars maltose and glucose. If your bananas are a little green, this will help sweeten and soften them. And if your bananas are already quite ripe, this will help convert any remaining starches into sugars. As the pancakes cook, these sugars start to caramelize, giving the pancakes a robust banana flavor.

For tender pancakes with just enough loft, I incorporate buttermilk. The ingredient is acidic, so it reacts with baking soda to create carbon dioxide, which helps aerate the pancakes. Baking soda also raises the pH of the batter, which speeds up the browning and crisping on the pancake’s exterior. This is also known as the Maillard reaction, a series of chemical reactions that occur when heat transforms proteins and sugars into complex new flavors and aromas. 

The Maillard reaction also occurs elsewhere in this pancake recipe: In the brown butter that's mixed into the batter to add richness to the pancakes. Inspired by my colleague Nicole Hopper’s technique of blooming spices in the brown butter for her oatmeal raisin cookie recipe, I decided to do the same in my pancake batter. I melt butter over medium heat, and as the butter cooks, the water boils off completely and the milk proteins brown, leaving behind golden brown butter with a nutty, toasty flavor. I remove the butter from the heat, then add the ground cinnamon to the butter while it’s still hot. The hot brown butter draws out the cinnamon’s fat-soluble flavor compounds, giving the pancakes a warm spiced note.

As complicated as these pancakes may sound, they're really not difficult to make, and they come together in less than 30 minutes. And if you’re craving banana bread, these will certainly be ready much more quickly than the time it takes to bake a loaf.