Tahini & Poovan Banana Tea Cake

Okay, so I cannot claim to be the genius behind this recipe folding ripe bananas and tahini into the best banana bread you ever had. That crown goes entirely to Adam Roberts of the Amateur Gourmet, though apparently the moment he blogged it (that was July 21), Rich and Delish had their own recipe up, too (that was July 24). Who says food blogging is not a race? And for once really in the years of neglect this blog has seen, I’m going to follow suit (July 30!). Here is the story of why & how.

Some talk of this banana bread floated by me one early morning via a Taste podcast featuring Adam Roberts, while, as it happened, I was staring at a pile of poovan bananas from the garden, now on the kitchen counter, that were fast blackening. And the jar of tahini from last night’s hummus was right there.

These are signs, I thought, to be taken for wonders. I looked for Roberts’ recipe. I did not, at the time, find the copycat versions, but did find that Roberts’ original version was behind a paywall. [Curse] that, I thought. How hard can it be to make a tahini banana quick bread?

Not having a recipe in hand though, I had to think this one through. I’ve made quick breads plenty before, and made plenty variations on standard zucchini bread recipes and the like. They’re amongst the simplest recipes out there–versatile, quick, and very forgiving. But quick breads are not breads at all; they’re a lot more like tea cakes. Nobody in my town would ever think of these in the same breath as “bread,” and they’re quite right. So cakes they really are and cakes they shall be called. But they’re not dessert cakes really. They accompany a cup of steaming tea about as beautifully as a plate of pakodas, so: tea cake. The first thing I did was quite simply switch “bread” to “cake.”

[Not just me, the BBC’s Good Food had already called the cake a cake in 2019, and America’s Test Kitchen had put that very tahini-banana combo in its Perfect Cake cookbook a whole year prior. Roberts’ genius had had a few antecedents, I guess.]

The second thing I did was (I presume) to rethink the oil. The major addition to this tea cake is, of course, tahini and tahini is sesame. Normally, the tea cake takes just a neutral canola or vegetable oil. Absolutely loving the taste of a good cold-pressed sesame oil, however, and knowing that it will meld with the tahini tastes in this cake, that’s one must-have, I decided. This tea cake has all the richness of a good marachekku ennai–oil pressed with the use of specific wooden implements which keep the temperatures low and the oil’s flavor and properties mostly intact.

Third and really most crucially important is the use of the poovan banana itself. But more: thinking maybe a little less glibly about whether it was, in fact, Ina Garten who started the whole roast-broccoli-on-a-tray thing which became the sheet roasting social media craze, and thinking more seriously about the banana of the banana bread itself.

The “banana” of your average stateside banana bread is likely the Cavendish, and the dominance of Cavendish bananas in banana republics and plantation cultures of the planet have brought us to the edge of a precipice–an imminent “bananapocalypse,” as Alyssa Paredes puts it. Most banana cultivars have no seeds; they’re propagated from new suckers emerging from the underground rhizome–so new plants are clones, essentially. They are near-sterile, for the possibilities of the emergence of new species and new disease-resistant genetic strains by cross-pollinations or even the prospects of genetic engineering are low to non-existent. The large, pulpy, spotless and perfectly yellow Cavendish banana accounts for $4.7 billion in annual world exports and dominates banana exports generally. So susceptible are the world’s monocultured banana plantations to blight and fungal attacks, which have (in the case of the FOC fungus at least) “made transcontinental jumps from archipelagic Southeast Asia to every major banana-growing continent, confounding those who understand the pathogen as travelling through soil and plant materials” [Alyssa Paredes]–that the banana “has recently become an ‘endangered species’, even though it remains the most widely eaten fruit on the planet” [Sandra Calkin].

Most in the Western world that boasts endless freedoms and consumer choices will not have a choice about buying a Cavendish banana because that’s all the supermarkets know and stock, but I can do better. On any given day, we have at least half a dozen banana varieties to choose from, be they the malapazham (hills banana, virupakshi) or its ecotypes: the Sirumalai (from the Sirumalai hills) and the ladan (from the Shevroy hills); vayal vazhai (field banana), karpooravalli, poovan pazham (or the chakkarakeli), elakki (pictured below), rasthali (rasam+kathali=rasthali, ‘sweet juice’ banana), chevvazhai (red banana) etc. This is not to count the varieties of different regions, for instance the

• niche bananas like the karuvazhai and numaran, grown in homesteads by Kolli-Malai tribals,
• nanjangoodu rasaBaaLe (Karnataka, pictured below in Radhika Penagonda’s inimitable style),
• nendhiram (Kerala, used to make banana chips),
• elavazhai (also Kerala, but a seeded wild variety which supplies leaves/”ela” for serving food),
• bhimkol (wild, soft-seeded, from Assam),
• malbhog (of Bihar and Bengal),
• bhuri (of Maharashtra’s Palghar district, possibly a close karpooravalli cousin), and the
• kal vazhai/kaattu vazhai or jungli kela with seeds the size of tamarind, in several states (images below).
• there are the cooking varieties like Mukunthan/Monthan and
• the medicinal Peyan or peyam-pazham with thick, dense seeds, popular south of Madurai, in Tirunelveli and Tuticorin districts, as an after-dinner banana to aid digestion and ensure good morning motions! [My thanks to Stephen Amirtharaj for images and details about this banana]

Bananas came from here; Musa acuminata and Musa balbisiana were the once-upon-a-time progenitors of most present-day cultivars, but a “number of peripheral species … have contributed to the total diversity are also known to occur” [Uma Subbaraya]. So it’s no surprise that there is such biodiversity or that India is the world’s largest banana producer, both in farms and plantations as well as in home-backyards.

Below is the elakki banana–we have a variety that produces fruit no bigger than my thumb so you’d have to eat 6 to feel satisfied at all, but each of them full-bodied and slightly tart and delicious:

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Then there is the nanjangoodu rasaBaaLe …

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The kal vazhai or kaattu vazhai, wild banana with stones–the flower and fruit [image by Dinesh Valke]…

… and a video in which you can well see how this wild variety gets its name. [It’s claimed also to be useful in treating kidney stones–another “doctrine of signatures” instance.]

Sustaining the banana means preserving this rich biodiversity, and that means, among other things, ensuring the survival of the wild, seeded species. A 2006 FAO report notes that “in northeastern India, western Ghats, eastern Ghats and in Andaman and Nicobar Islands [which are India’s banana biodiversity hotspots], some wild Musa species still exist. Some species, however, are already extinct, and they have been extirpated from most of India that was once in forest” [Uma Subbaraya]. Denudation and other threats of rapid urbanization, and then there is always the threat of Panama wilt and other disease.

There is hope yet, but it is critical that we stop thinking of the “banana” as a single and somewhat boring slice-over-cereal thing, iconically represented by the flawlessly-yellow but deeply flawed Cavendish. It is critical even and especially in (industrialized) parts of the world where the banana does not natively grow because that’s where the hungriest Cavendish markets are, at the furthest remove from places with greater banana biodiversity and with the least comprehension of its vital necessity.

Hearing Adam Roberts speak blithely about publishing material that goes viral and seeing then the copycat posts to his tahini banana bread pre-figure another viral ascendance (or express a desire for it) was for me profoundly disconnected and ironic–when talk in any circles that know about bananas are all about those other pandemics decimating agricultural worlds and threatening the very existence of bananas on the face of this planet.

Poovan bananas are therefore both necessary to think with and great for this recipe because they are sweet and soft but with a body and firmness even when they are very ripe. See the yellow bananas tucked on either side of the mukkani payasam in the image below? Those are what we’ve had an abundance of this year, and what went into my version of this cake.

Good alternatives to poovan pazham would be karpooravalli, chevvazhai and possibly malapazham or hills bananas, all with body and bite even when very ripe but easily mashed.

The process I followed was to prep dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder and soda). Then prep the bananas: mash 4-5 ripe poovan bananas with a fork, add tahini and some thick curd:

Nicely whip up an egg-sugar-sesame oil mixture, and add the poovan mixture, alternating with flour, starting with the banana mix and ending with the flour mix.

Many Indian bakers make the mistake of overbeating these cake batters. Cake batters aren’t like idli batters, yo. Barely moisten everything and that’ll get you a beautiful crumb. Go at it like you want to whip the air out and you’ll be rewarded with giant wormholes.

See what I mean about a beautiful crumb? This tea cake keeps well for a few days, refrigerated, if it lasts you that long, that is.

Tahini & Poovan Banana Tea Cake

This tea cake is a version of Adam Roberts’ Tahini Banana Bread, made local in name (nobody thinks of these cakes as breads around here), the use of cold-pressed sesame oil, and a local banana variety called poovan pazham. It’s simple, quick, richly sesame-flavored and absolutely delicious.

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Ingredients

  

Dry Ingredients

• 1 ½ cups all purpose flour (or substitute with whole wheat for a denser but equally delicious cake)
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 level teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt

Wet Ingredients 1

• 4-5 poovan bananas or equivalent local variety
• 2 tablespoons thick yogurt
• ½ cup tahini
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

Wet Ingredients 2

• 2 eggs
• ½ cup cold pressed sesame oil (use a good quality oil with rich flavor, or use half of a good sesame oil and half of some other neutral oil like canola or vegetable for a milder flavor )
• ¾ cup sugar (or part powdered jaggery and part white sugar)

Instructions

 

• Preheat oven to 180C/350F
• Line an 8” cake pan with parchment or a banana leaf; lightly grease and flour the parchment/leaf.
• Sift together the dry ingredients in a small bowl. Set aside.
• In another small bowl, use a fork to mash the bananas roughly. Some lumps are perfectly fine. Add the yogurt, tahini, and vanilla, and mix to combine loosely.
• In a larger bowl, whisk the eggs with the oil and sugar until they are well incorporated and the eggs appear a pale yellow—about a minute or two.
• Now add the banana mixture about a third at a time, followed by the flour mixture about a third at a time. Like that, alternate wet and dry additions, ending with the flour. Mix gently until everything is moistened, but do not beat and do not overmix.
• Tip the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the top is browning nicely and a cake tester comes out clean.
• When the cake is done, run a knife around the edges and allow to cool before turning it out onto a plate and peeling off the parchment/leaf.
• Cut into wedges and serve warm or at room temperature with steaming glasses of spiced tea.

Notes

This is a purist’s recipe—no chocolate chips, no additional flavors, and no nuts. This tea cake has plenty of what it needs from the tahini and sesame oil, not to mention the poovan banana. Just let those tastes shine.