Sending out an SOS for Huckleberry’s banana bread

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Helen Chiu of Westchester normally heads straight for the flatbread when she goes to pastry chef Zoe Nathan’s Huckleberry Cafe in Santa Monica. (Helen admits: ‘I am addicted.’) Recently, though, she tried something different: The banana poppy seed bread. ‘I found it quite extraordinary. It’s not too sweet.’ Helen wanted more, so she wrote to Culinary SOS for the recipe. Huckleberry graciously agreed to help out.

In all, Times Test Kitchen manager Noelle Carter tested the recipe five times, first to scale down the proportions of the recipe for the home cook, and then to test for variables.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how it all worked:

The first crack at the recipe yielded more dough than required for one loaf. Noelle divided the batter into two loaf pans, just to see how it turned out. The results were OK, but there were some follow-up questions for the folks at Huckleberry. What size loaf pans does the bakery normally use? How did the baker slice the bananas for the top? Also, how much sugar went into the topping? (The original recipe didn’t specify.)

The answers solved some of the mystery:

Huckleberry uses a “Pullman” loaf pan, which produces sandwich loaf-size breads. But that’s not a pan size most homes will have. With new details about the decorative banana slicing and sugary topping, Noelle went back to work and adapted the recipe to accommodate common-size loaf pans. The next two baking sessions were all bout determining the proper temperature and baking time in the wake of the changes in loaf sizes.

The recipe was tested again, but this time the focus was on refining the instructions of the recipe itself. A Test Kitchen intern was asked to follow the recipe, without any prompting from Noelle. After a few more tweaks, Noelle had one more test: Would the recipe work equally well in a glass pan? It did.

Helen, we hope you enjoy your recipe as much as we all enjoyed helping Noelle with her testing. And by ‘helping,’ we mean greedily pouncing on slices of banana bread as soon as they were cool enough to touch.

If you have an SOS request, write to us at food@latimes.com. We cannot guarantee success -- we get hundreds of requests, and not every restaurant is as willing to share as Huckleberry -- but we will do our best. In the meantime, here’s a look at some recipe requests that we recently answered.

Here are some more recipes from the L.A. Times Test Kitchen.

-- Rene Lynch