If you’re like me and have been panic buying bananas, you’ve definitely tried turning the overripe ones into banana bread. I’ve done three of them. You might have a favorite recipe in a book or have gone to Google or YouTube to search one  out.  I tested three of our web resources.

AtoZ World Food is perfect for researching world cultures, world food, finding great pictures, with a catalog of thousands of recipes. A search for banana bread results in 10 different banana breads from various “Banana Lands,” for example, Bermuda, Brazil, Angola, or Zimbabwe.  One I think I’d like to try is the Banana Mango Bread from the Dominican Republic.  I’m not going to repeat the recipe here but have linked to it in the previous sentence, but just as soon as my banana pile turns black, this is what I’m doing.

For current recipes, I looked in PressReader, a great source for streaming current magazines and newspapers from around the world. It is easy to search but the results change day-to-day since they do not keep more than three or four back issues.  A search will look through all 7,000 different publications and give results from only the last three days.  Right now, I find banana bread with lots of variations, including blueberries, chocolate, oats, and sometimes measured out in grams and baked in Celsius.  This source is excellent for many reasons. I feel up-to-date on how the Coronavirus Quarantine prompted an explosion in home baking and have found a wide variety of recipes.

The other web resource I searched is Global Newsstream. This is not a streaming source but a straight up database of newspaper articles from thousands of papers dating back to the 1980’s (generally).  I did a search for the phrase (in quotation marks) “banana bread recipe”. There were 618 results arranged from most recent to the oldest, a 1985 article called 1955 Banana Bread Recipe has Become a Kitchen Classic published in the Toronto Star. This recipe contains shortening so I won’t be trying it, ever.  I had to click through four or five more articles until I got one that did much more than mention banana bread. Global Newsstream is good for many different areas of research but was not the immediate reward I thought it would be.

Now off to the kitchen to eat a fresh banana.