Chrissy Teigen has been a major Hollywood player for some time. The 35-year-old beauty shot to fame in the early 2010s as a model, appearing in magazines like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and hosting TV competitions such as VH1’s Model Employee. In 2013, she married the uber-famous singer-songwriter John Legend (the pair had been dating since 2006), and the two have been a powerful celebrity couple ever since.
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Teigen is also very skilled in the kitchen and has spent the last few years capitalizing on her talents with cookbooks, a tableware line, and more. It’s no wonder she sent fans into a frenzy when she asked the Twitterverse for an ingredient to use in her delicious banana bread!
Chrissy Teigen Loves To Cook
While Teigen has turned her love of cooking into a lucrative brand, the mom of two admits that at first, it was just a hobby born out of necessity. In a 2017 essay she wrote for Glamour, she said:
When John and I got together, I found my love for cooking. On one of our earliest dates, I took him to Daniel (four dollar signs on Yelp, ahhh!). I drank a $40 margarita, ate salmon rillettes (fancy salmon spread), and prayed my card wouldn’t be declined. I couldn’t afford to take him out to more dinners like that, so I started cooking more and more at home for us. I started with my own version of that salmon spread, then roasted whole branzino, osso buco, chipotle BBQ chicken. When my first cookbook came out, I finally felt proud of my work.
That cookbook, Cravings: Recipes for All of the Food You Want To Eat, was released in 2016. Two years later, she published a second cookbook called Cravings: Hungry For More, and also launched a cooking and tableware line for Target called Cravings by Chrissy Teigen. In 2019, the Lip Sync Battle co-host launched a website with the same name, featuring recipes, cooking tips, how-to videos, restaurant guides, and more. When she introduced her new site, Teigen said:
“Introducing my new baby I’ve been spending a ton (and I mean a ton) of time getting ready for you (I had a lot of homework!!). There’s been a lot of testing and tasting and testing and tasting…and testing and tasting to make sure that these recipes are ‘Cravings #goalsssss.’ Don’t worry, I made sure everything is pretty but not too perfect (because let’s be honest sometimes tasty = messy!!).”
The Banana Bread Twitter Frenzy
So what was the big banana bread uproar all about? Back in 2017, Teigen made a simple request that crated chaos on Twitter. Realizing she was out of a needed ingredient for her recipe, the model Tweeted: “If u have 6 BROWN bananas in the LA area, I will send my assistant to your home with a signed cookbook, John’s underwear and a Becca palette.”
Within minutes, Teigen was deluged with responses. At first, she was getting tons of tips for browning bananas, so the kitchen queen clarified:
“Ok this banana thing is getting ridiculous. don’t tell me your banana browning hacks. just…if u have 6 BROWN bananas in the LA area lmk.”
Teigen even added criteria to the “submissions” so she’d know they were authentic:
“SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY. please send me a photo of u holding the bananas, giving the peace sign.”
Fans in the L.A. area were happy to oblige. Eventually, Teigen settled on a set of five browned bananas from Twitter user @bymeg. And true to her word, she sent her assistant over to pick up the goods!
Teigen clearly enjoyed benefiting from this impromptu Twitter request service, because three years later, she tried it again! Back in March 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown, the master baker offered to trade her scrumptious banana bread for some lettuce.
“I’ll make a banana bread for anyone that has romaine lettuce. The trade will be made 6 feet apart and we will place the goods on the floor. no funny business.”
Talk about coming full circle!
Chrissy Teigen’s Banana Bread Recipe
(Anna Hoychuk / Shutterstock.com)
Interested in making this delicious banana bread yourself? We have the recipe! It’s also featured in Teigen’s second cookbook. Enjoy!
Ingredients (yields 12 servings)
- 2 cups mashed very ripe bananas
- 4 eggs
- 2/3 cups canola oil, plus a little more to grease the pan
- 2 cups all-purpose flour, plus a little more for dusting the pan
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 (3.5-ounce) box vanilla instant pudding mix
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1½ teaspoons kosher salt
- 1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut
- 1 (3.5-ounce) bar dark chocolate, chopped into chunks
- Salted butter, for serving
Baking Instructions
- Heat the oven to 325°F.
- Combine the mashed bananas, eggs and oil in a large bowl
- In a separate bowl, combine the flour, sugar, pudding mix, baking soda and salt.
- Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and combine well.
- Fold in the coconut and chocolate chunks.
- Grease and flour a Bundt pan, then pour in the batter.
- Bake 60 to 80 minutes. (At around 50 minutes, insert a toothpick into the bread—if the toothpick comes out clean, it’s done!
- Let it cool in the pan, then flip the bread onto a plate.
- Cut it into slices, rewarm as needed, and serve with salty butter!