If I'm making Banana bread, could I substitute for the butter with an equal amount of Avocado or would a different ratio be needed ?

Lol… I don’t think so. IT would taste weird.

Might be better to use a healthy oil…

As I said “I’m not really concerned as much with taste as with texture and suitability for baking”.

I think your thinking of Guacamole which does have very strong flavor.
Obviously I’m NOT talking about Guacamole but Avocado only. By itself it doesn’t have much flavor to it. It’s an extremely mild flavor easily overpowered by stronger flavors.

The wife has used Coconut oil in place of butter a few times and it was pretty good.

@SQUEEKY2

Yeah, that’s in the back of my mind and I have a big container of it. But its better in warmer weather cuz right now it’s hard as a rock :)

Avo is a whole lot easier to work with :)

I love that idea! I can’t believe I never thought of doing that before. I googled using avocado in place of butter and whole bunch of recipes came up, like this one. The recipe lists butter, but she says in parentheses right next to it that she’s also used the recipe with no butter at all and that it still turned out really well.

Thank you for the idea. I love banana bread and I’m definitely using avocado next time I make it.

I have made the mousse and love it in smoothies but I never cook with avocado. I might add it as a last ingredient after pizza or burritos or something had cooked. At the very least I would add plenty of lemon juice. But I wonder if the integrity of the nutrients would be compromised.

I do cook with avocado oil. It has a high smoke point.

The other thing you might try is pumpkin. I have used that very neutral taste. It does make things drier I think. Or maybe that’s just the flours I use (gluten free) I have taken to adding glazes or dumping coffee tea or milk on the finished product. I don’t mean literally dumping you can definitely control what and how much to suit your purpose.

When I do these sort of substitutions I start out with using half what the recipe calls for and half what I am substituting with. The first batch is still almost always edible, even if I don’t love it, and I decide how I can adjust for next time. For instance, the apple sauce substitution i add more applesauce than the oil that I take out, and I still keep some of the oil in my recipes. When I completely eliminate it, it ruins the texture of cakes, but is ok for brownies (but even brownies I keep some oil, because I usually get rid of the egg yolks).

I personally am not very keen about coconut oil, because it is very saturated fat, and as much as I love real coconut in desserts, in certain things it just tastes like artifical fat to me.

I hope you let us know how it turns out.

Can’t you substitute bananas for butter?

Upon some reading avocado is used in baking and I found nothing about it ruining it’s nutritional benefits.

The sites seemed to say a one to one ratio but some adjusting might be required for further batches.

Thanks everybody for your great responses. Lurve for all.

@Unbroken

Do you have a specific recipe for your Mousse? If so, could you share it ? Thanks.

Mine was just a trial and error combo of Sour Cream, Cocoa powder, sugar and Avocado which is different all the time.

@DrasticDreamer

What a terrific link. I learned a lot from it. I also like her Walnut Butter recipe and it should be pretty easy to do in my Vitamix.

Her Avo-Banana Bread recipe looks really interesting and apparently using twice as much butter to Avo. of many other recipes so I now have not much fear of using it for baking.

However, I might do some tweaking on the leavening agents since looking at her pics, I notice that her bread is all caved in in the center.

I’m sure it tastes delish but I prefer my bread slices to look more like regular bread slices :)

I also noticed that in her recipe, the oven temp is significantly higher and the baking time shorter than most standard recipes. I wonder if that contributes to the caving-in effect.

For others, what do you do re: oven temps and time when making banana bread ? Just curious.

Anyhow, I don’t currently have any bananas or Avocados at all and need to give them time to overripen adequately but once I do make some, I’ll update.

My interest in all of this was recently peaked when Mario Cantone was on the View making his version (which apparently is so good that there’s a little coffee shop in Manhattan which sells out of it whenever he makes a batch)

He emphasized using twice the amount of bananas as typical (until I read thru his recipe online and realized that it was a double recipe making two loaves). So all of a sudden 7–8 bananas doesn’t seem all that much after all :)

I’m always tweaking recipes this is the base line I use mousse

I’ve used baking chocolate, cocoa, different coffee flavor blends. Teas. Different extracts different sugars and different toppings nuts and berries. I always like mine cold.

…why would you not be concerned with taste?

I don’t see why not. If applesauce can be subbed when it is texturally nothing like butter, then mashed avocado should work fine.

Personally, I’d just use the damn butter. It’s bread – I tend to get my “healthy fats” elsewhere.

The main reason I said that I’m not worried about taste is because Avocado is so mild tasting that just about anything else is stronger than it is.

I’ve used it to make mousse and ice cream and if one didn’t know ahead of time that it was an ingredient, there is no way that it would be obvious from taste alone.

It’s not that I don’t care about taste. It’s that I wasn’t WORRIED about taste due to my previous experiences with Avocado.

^ gotcha.