GOING BANANAS
Green, yellow, or black (don’t forget the peel), bananas do it all
SWhen the musician Donovan’s hit single Mellow Yellow first came out in 1966, my older brother bought it on vinyl. I was still a kid but, like the rest of the world at that time, I was crazy about this song. I’d wander around the house singing the chorus over and over: “They call me mellow yellow ... quite likely.” Unbeknownst to me, in the popular culture of the time, the song was assumed to be about smoking banana peels.
The idea that banana skins contain psychedelics was actually widely circulated on American university campuses in the late 60s and early 70s. A hoax recipe for “bananadine”, a fictional psychoactive substance extracted from banana peels, was first published in the Berkeley Barb in 1967. Even The New York Times featured bananadine around the same time in an article titled “Cool Talk About Hot Drugs”. Urban legend spread like wildfire, to the point the US FDA announced it was investigating “the possible hallucinogenic effects of banana peels”. It was, in fact, all bollocks. But perhaps it helps explain why the humble banana turns up in slang to describe a situation as crazy or wild, or a person’s behaviour as erratic or mad. As in “the crowd went bananas”, or “he’s totally bananas”. What banana skins are good for are roses, and for that matter, almost every garden plant. The peels contain calcium, which promotes root growth and helps add oxygen to your soil, magnesium, which assists with photosynthesis, sulphur, which helps plants develop strong roots and repel pests, and potassium, which builds plant resistance, improves plant vigour and promotes fruiting and flowering. Equally, bananas offer a treasure trove of useful mineral vitamins and nutrients to us humans. In New Zealand, we do go bananas for bananas, eating a whopping 18kg per person per year, more bananas than any nation in the world. I like my bananas on the slightly green side, while they are still firm and slightly acidic. Interestingly, once they are very ripe, bananas lose their acidity and become alkaline.
This means when you are using really ripe bananas in baking, you will usually need a bit more baking powder than if they are greenish in order to avoid a heavy result.
The transition from a firm, pale greenyyellow banana to one that is yellow and deeply speckled with black spots, or even entirely black and soft, seems to happen almost overnight. To slow down ripening, store bananas away from other fruits, wrap up the ends in tape or plastic wrap (most of the ethylene produced is released at the top of the bunch), store them in the fridge once they are ripened to your liking, or freeze them (whole in their skins, or peeled and broken into chunks). Whatever you do, don’t throw them out — bananas can be completely black and they’ll still be excellent for baking.