Give Banana Bread A Glow-Up With This Underrated Ingredient

Whipping up a moist, flavorful, and aromatic banana bread is the best way to use up overripe bananas. This classic bake is incredibly delicious in its unadulterated state, but if you want to give it a culinary glow-up, add some butterscotch chips to the batter. Often overshadowed by popular add-ins, such as caramel, chocolate, and toffee, these golden nuggets have a full-bodied flavor and delectable consistency.

Butterscotch is made by heating brown sugar and butter together. Unlike caramel, which is prepared with white sugar, butterscotch has a richer flavor and deeper color because of the extra molasses present in the brown sugar. When cooled, it can be broken up into chips that have a firm and smooth texture (just like chocolate chips) and added to cookies, cakes, and puddings.

While you can easily amp up a classic banana bread with apricots to lend it a touch of texture or even add in some pineapple and coconut to turn it into a Southern dessert (known as Hummingbird cake), including butterscotch chips in the batter does something a little different. The pieces melt slightly as the banana bread bakes, creating pockets of gooeyness and sweet buttery flavor that balance the consistency of the surrounding crumb. Having said that, butterscotch doesn't completely melt and turn liquid when heated like chocolate does. It retains some of its shape, allowing you to seamlessly cut into your cooled bake to reveal the distinct butterscotch nuggets inside and produce perfect slabs of banana-scented goodness.

Stirring butterscotch chips through your banana bread batter (just before scraping it into your loaf pan) is the easiest way to incorporate them into your recipe. Be mindful that they will sweeten your final bake considerably, so if you usually add chocolate chips to your recipe, simply sub them for butterscotch to prevent over-sweetening it. However, you could just as easily use a mixture of ingredients to get the best of both worlds. Additionally, using a darker, bitter chocolate instead of a milk chocolate is ideal for counterbalancing the sugariness of the butterscotch chips. 

You could also melt the chips down in a double boiler with some butter and combine it with your wet ingredients to imbue the entirety of your banana bread with a caramel-like flavor. Melted butterscotch chips can also be employed as a final drizzle over baked banana bread to create a pretty aesthetic.

A quick way to cut through the added sweetness is to sprinkle a touch of flaky sea salt over your banana bread. Salt is often added to caramel to both offset its cloyingly rich character and enhance its flavor. Luckily, the same trick works for butterscotch, too.