M&S finds trick to slipping bananas in fruit salad

THE tendency to rapidly brown and turn to mush makes sliced banana a high-risk candidate for inclusion in a classic fruit salad.

But now Marks and Spencer has developed an advanced method for keeping them firm and yellow, with the help of a secret housewives’ trick.

The discovery, which comes after years of testing, has prompted it to add bananas to its classic fruit salads for the first time.

As home cooks who make fruit salads know only too well, using banana can prove tricky because it quickly discolours when its skin is removed.

The old housewives’ method to avoid this is to drizzle the slices with lemon juice, which slows the ageing process, since it is acidic.

M&S has enhanced the technique by spraying banana slices with a mix of citric acid and amino acid as soon as it is peeled.

The coating preserves the banana without affecting the taste or nutritional content.

Bananas brown more rapidly than other fruit because they contain high amounts of a chemical called ethylene. When they are peeled and cut, ethyl- ene is released and the acids in the fruit begin to break down. This causes it go soft and brown.

M&S tested various varieties of banana to find those that age the slowest and to calculate the peak time during ripening to prepare it.

It found Cavendish bananas age the slowest, and the store now chops them when they are slightly under-ripe, leaving time for them to develop flavour once they are sprayed and packaged.

Rose Wilkinson, a fruit technologist at M&S, said: “We’ve spent years trying to overcome this so that we can include it in our prepared fruit salads.”