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I saw a post in 2008 about resting banana bread batter, where they were discussing about resting batter. I understand that this would exhaust the leavening agent. (i.e. baking powder/soda) I only have 1 pan, and I am currently using it for proofing which takes hours. I made another banana bread batter on the side to bake in that same pan as soon as the 1st bread finished baking. But this time, I didn't add any leaveners and would add it as soon as the pan becomes available. Does this affect the bread at all?

TLDR: I made banana bread batter without a leavening agent and the batter will rest for a couple hours before I add the agent as soon as I'm ready to bake. Does this affect the bread?

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  • It's very tricky to get baking powder or baking soda to mix evenly into wet batter - the odds of bitter-tasting lumps in the finished bread are quite high. You're "proofing" banana bread batter for hours, or you have some yeast bread dough in your only pan?
    – Ecnerwal
    Sep 23 at 20:20
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    In this case, I usually prep wet+dry separately and leave them separate until the pan is ready. Then the last step is literally the last mixing step, and the batter can be fresh while also being (mostly) already prepared. You can also freeze the batter to slow the development, but that works better for longer time periods (days rather than hours)
    – stanri
    Sep 24 at 7:12

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Another aspect apart from the difficulty of evenly distributing the chemical leavening agent is gluten development. Resting wet flour will start that process.

While this is desired in e.g. yeasted breads, the results can be somewhat rubbery in quick breads and similar.

If possible, I would bake the banana bread now and think about alternatives to the pan you had intended to use. Individual servings in a muffin pan, for example?

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The nature of a "quick" (chemically leavened) bread is that it's very quickly mixed, so normally one would go no further than mixing the dry ingredients together until ready to put it into the pan and oven right after mixing with the wet ingredients.

As commented, distributing the baking soda/powder without mixing those with the other dry ingredients is difficult to reliably achieve, so you may get bitter tasting lumps where a clump of leavening agent is in the batter, poorly mixed.

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  • This is the approach that I would take (unless I had somehow miscounted my pans or realized one had a problem) You might even be able to mix some of the wet stuff together, although the bananas might get dark on you. (I use molasses in mine, so probably wouldn’t notice)
    – Joe
    Sep 23 at 21:44

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