They’re good raw, but simply divine when cooked
The longer they age, the tastier bananas are for cooking, Karen Barnaby writes.
While purchasing a bag of overly ripe bananas to cook these recipes with, I contemplated that bananas are one of the handful of things that, like Parmesan cheese, are tastier to cook with the longer they age. Bananas are fine to eat raw, but I think they really shine when cooked. They become sweeter, yet also acquire a certain tang. I have yet to bump into someone who doesn’t like banana bread.
I used to buy jars of banana baby food to experience that special, cooked banana flavour. And when I was a kid, my favourite ice cream cone was banana. Astro yogurt, oh say about 40 years ago, had banana yogurt with the banana on the bottom that I bought in individual serving containers.
Anyone who is a fan of peeling off layers of certain foods — Oreo cookies, Kit Kat bars and Coffee Crisp for example — will understand and appreciate what I’m about to say. The top of the yogurt had the barest hint of banana.
I would carefully coax the yogurt out with a spoon, shaving off thin layers, and relishing the intensity of the banana flavour as it grew stronger toward the bottom. In order to dig into the banana at the bottom there had to be the right amount of yogurt over the top of it. The yogurt itself was unsweetened and balanced artfully with the sweetness of the banana.
Bananas have made their way deeply into our culture: the word game Bananagram, the 1980s group Bananarama, the phrase “going bananas,” Woody Allen’s movie Bananas, the Velvet Underground and Nico’s debut album cover that sported an Andy Warhol’s banana with a peel-off skin, and the ubiquitous sight gag of slipping on a banana peel.
The banana plant is called a banana tree, but it’s technically regarded as a herbaceous plant, because the stem does not contain true woody tissue.
The banana tree gives freely of its gifts and in areas where they are grown, people take advantage of the edible flowers, use the leaves for wrapping foods before steaming or as plates, while the fibres can be spun and made into cloth, and the peels can be made into curries.
The trunk core and rootstock are edible and the sap is used for glue. The large seeds of wild bananas can be ground into flour and the white inside of the peels can be used for cleaning or bug bites. Try it by rubbing the peels, white side down, on greasy spots on your stove or on a bug bite.