by Mal Morgenstern

r/ididnthaveeggs is one of my favourite subreddits. It’s a collection of screenshots of people substituting ingredients or skipping steps in recipes, then complaining about the results to the recipe writer. As an example, one of the most famous posts is someone substituting pumpkin purée for… cider vinegar? For some reason??

The thing is I get it. Not the complaining to the recipe writer, which is a comically petty way to cope with your own fuck-ups. But I have a bunch of annoying food intolerances. I also don’t often shop specifically for a recipe, but I try to find things I can make with what I already have. So I am a big fan of a good substitution. However, I am very impulsive with my cooking and often more eager to experiment with ways to make a recipe more flexible, than to make something edible. To protect my pride, I will all too frequently grimace through a meal gone wrong, saying between mouthfuls “I can’t believe this actually fucks! Wow!”.

I can say without a doubt that this banana bread is the closest I’ve ever flown to the sun, and I am under no illusion of the gravity of the crimes I have committed.

This is a recipe post that has been requested by the editors of QSO Media themselves, after I posted this monstrosity in our group chat. But I beg of you: please don’t bake this. The original recipe is this one for Justine Pattison‘s vegan banana bread. Doesn’t that look lovely? I recommend you bake that instead.

What happened was I started making this recipe thinking I had all the ingredients, only to realise too late that all my ingredients were in insufficient quantities. I was forced to substitute the remainder, or else give up and eat a bowl of 4 already-mashed, overripe bananas. My hubris decided to turn this into an experiment. I have no one to blame but myself.

To quote Toni, in response to me sending this in our group chat:

“r/IDidntHaveAnything”

I would describe the tasting experience of this ‘banana bread’ as an identity crisis. The basic taste is pretty much correct. Despite the ridiculous amount of peanut butter, it doesn’t taste like peanuts. It is almost a flapjack, but not quite.

It still crumbs like a cake or bread, but when you cut it in the pan (because leaving to cool on a wire rack is for cowards), the crumbs will hit the pan sounding like gravel. The texture resembles an unappetising cereal bar that is still quadruple the price of a regular one because it is labelled as ‘High In Protein’. The mouthfeel is unholy, and it will scratch your throat on the way down in a way you did not think possible for a baked good. (But then this is really more of a baked evil.)

None of this has dissuaded me from eating several slices. I cannot say I would recommend it to anyone, but I will eat most of what’s left of it, for I am not a quitter.

Justine, I am sorry for what I have wrought on this world.

Ingredients

4 overripe bananas

Note: This whole thing started because we had 4 overripe bananas to use up, and Toni had just that week posted the most divine looking banana bread in the group chat. So I was quite peckish for some. I picked a vegan banana bread since there are no eggs, which makes the banana-to-bread ratio higher – that way the loaf wouldn’t be so massive that it would get wasted anyway. This was a noble but futile ambition.

100g granulated brown sugar

Note: The original recipe calls for soft brown sugar. There is a texture difference, but it’s double the price, and I would prefer to spend that money on literally anything else. Like two entire jars of branded peanut butter.

100g self-raising flour

Note: This should be poured into a bowl before realising that the second packet of flour you had found in the back of the cupboard was a packet of budget white sugar with the same bare-bones branding as the budget flour. Not pouring the white sugar into the bowl with everything else was the only crisis I managed to avert over the course of this journey.

200g of the cheapest porridge oats you can buy

Note: These will replace most of the flour. You want the cheap ones because they are already very powdery. If I’d had the time and the patience, this could have been improved if blended or food processed to create oat flour. But this banana bread is not the work of a careful and patient man.

Notably, this is not my first dalliance with oats as a substitute for flour. During college, with no blender to hand, I would grind porridge oats with a mortar and pestle to make oat cookie dough, which, for all I offered to share, none of my roommates would ever eat. Thinking back, this may have been a warning from the universe.

50g of sunflower spread

Note: The original recipe calls for 150ml sunflower oil, but you’ll agree that this is the most common-sense of any of the substitutions in this recipe, although it is still imperfect (typical sunflower spread is about 70% fat, while the oil is 100% fat, so it should be more like 72g of spread). Oil would also have worked better as the dry-ish mixture from this recipe is extremely stiff. You could get closer to an ‘oil’ by giving the spread a few seconds in the microwave. I did not do this.

200g of smooth peanut butter

Note: This is about half of a normal-sized jar. You need double the amount of peanut butter because you are trying to achieve the same amount of fat as 100ml of oil. Additionally, you leave out the nuts and sultanas in the original recipe, because trust me, you have enough sugar and nuts using this substitute.

I used two different smooth peanut butters (Manilife, which I eat with a spoon from the jar late at night while making disgusting noises of appreciation, and Whole Earth, which I use for cooking/baking because I don’t think it tastes very good on its own) which I think was probably the right move. Yes, I will penny-pinch over two different textures of sugar, and then replace a trivial amount of oil with half a jar’s worth of two branded peanut butters. I am not a rational soul but an artiste.

0g of any raising agent

Note: There is not enough in the self-raising flour, since most of it has been replaced with oats. This in combination with the too-large tray will make the ‘bread’ flat and unable to rise. We must preserve our mistakes for the purpose of scientific replication. But you still shouldn’t make this.

Procedure

Step One: Preheat the oven to 180C/160C Fan/Gas Mark 4, and grease a big roasting tin. This is because you bake so rarely that you have no loaf tins, and you forget how big a bowl full of batter will look when poured out, so even your passable bakes are Flat Fuck Friday and have an evil crust-to-inside ratio. You will realise later upon pouring out the mixture that the smaller roasting tin would have been fine.

Step Two: Peel the bananas and put them in a mixing bowl. Mash them with a fork like the original recipe says, or the back of a big spoon, if you are a daring disruptor. 

Step Three: Realise you are missing the majority of the ingredients in the quantities you require. Spend ten minutes hunting through the cupboards while trying to figure out the peanut butter-to-oil ratio.

Step Four: Put the flour, porridge oats, and sugar into the same bowl and stir vigorously.

Step Five: Measure out 50g of sunflower spread and 200g of peanut butters. Spend another ten minutes trying to extract 150g of peanut butter from a squeezy bottle. This is your workout for the day. Resign yourself to sacrificing 50g of the jar of Nice Peanut Butter to make up the rest of the amount. Eat the remaining scraps of the Nice Peanut Butter from the jar with a spoon, because you feel pity for it. It didn’t deserve this fate, relegated to lubricating your ship of Theseus.

Step Six: Add the peanut butter to the mixture. Stir with even more aggression. The mixture should have the consistency of nearly hardened cement, but if it becomes impossible to stir, add even more peanut butter. Marvel that even at this point, it smells like pretty normal uncooked banana bread.

Step Seven: Realise the oven has been preheated for at least half an hour, which probably erases any environmental benefits of your brave rescue of four bananas.

Step Eight: Once the mixture is combined, pour it into the too-big tin. Realise your mistake in using the big tin, but refuse to adjust at this point because you are not scraping sticky raw banana bread out of two containers. 

Step Nine: Place in oven for 30 minutes if your oven is a portal to hell, or 50-60 minutes if it isn’t. Check on the ‘bread’ every ten minutes or so while you wonder at how the mixture can smell alternately disgusting or appetising, depending whether the minute of the cooking timer is odd or even. 

Step Ten: Remember that this pursuit of banana bread was to make doing the dishes interesting enough for your recently diagnosed, as-of-yet unmedicated ADHD. In this regard, it’s been a resounding success! You can now use the cooking time to wash the other dishes and erase the evidence of your 4am crimes.

Step Eleven: If the top of the bread is browning too fast, and it will, cover it with aluminium foil. Who am I kidding? You’re not going to do that. Just take it out when the top is burnt, and turn off the oven before you’ve checked it’s cooked all the way through. Nobody ever got a Michelin star without being bold.

Step Twelve: A skewer* stabbed into the cake should come out dry (unless you hit on a bit of mashed banana, in which case test a few other spots), but this may be a lost cause. If all instructions were followed to the letter, the mixture will have already been solid stone by the time it made it to the oven.

Step Thirteen: Eat straight out of the pan while contemplating your bleak future.

*an uncooked spaghetti strand that you risk shoving too far into your bake and breaking off, creating a crunchy garnish! 🙂

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Mal Morgenstern is a writer, visual artist, and musician. Check out their GitHub here.

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