Nu Fun 4 Old Bananas

Nu Fun 4 Old Bananas

With The Wife out of town for the weekend, I was faced with the prospect of a fruit basket filled with bananas that seemed to brown with age spots as I watched.

For breakfast Saturday morning, I decided to eat them fried with a pot o' beans I'd made the night before.

I just put some butter in a pan, sliced bananas lengthwise, and cooked them up all brown and glistening.

They were fabulous, and an excellent accompaniment to garlicky beans.

It's really quite remarkable how a little heat and butter can modify the taste of an ordinary banana and make it something unusually wonderful. The sugars and starches in the banana brown up gorgeously; the texture becomes silky, pate-like. And the sweetness I'd have to confer with McGee on the biochemistry involved, but when cooked, sweet banana flavors pop big time.

They were so good yesterday, I had them again for breakfast today.

Anyhow, that's one thing I do to amuse myself when The Wife is out of town.

Thanks, I'll have to try that; so far the only thing I've used spotty bananas for is smoothies. Lately I've taken to peeling and freezing bananas for smoothies, specifically to prevent reaching the brown spotty phase. Slightly green, that's how I prefer them plain.

Once the bananas are soft and spotty, they are perfest for baking. Rather than throw them away, peel and and freeze the pulp. I often use one of the banana bread recipes from Beard on Bread. When I'm ready to bake a loaf, I just remove approximately two bananas worth from my freezer.

Any good banana cookie recipes out there?

Had a couple of browning bananas handy last week and thought I'd make banana pecan pancakes -- but frankly the sliced bananas didn't add much. Is there a better way to make them -- maybe mash them into the wet ingredients? (I sliced them fairly thin and then halved the slices.)

Hi Bob. When I make banana pancakes I mash one soft one into the milk I use for the batter. I slice the bananas unevenly and a little on the thick side. Gives it the umph I think you desire. I've also added a little banana liquor in there. I suppose one of those flavored syrups would work as well. Good luck.

bryan wrote:Hi Bob. When I make banana pancakes I mash one soft one into the milk I use for the batter. I slice the bananas unevenly and a little on the thick side. Gives it the umph I think you desire. I've also added a little banana liquor in there. I suppose one of those flavored syrups would work as well. Good luck.

Thanks, bryan, that may make the difference, especially as I'm the first to admit that I'm very, very generous with both the cinnamon and the pecans, so the bananas have a lot to compete with.

My old trusty Joy of Cooking offers a pretty delectable Banana Cake recipe. My Momma taught me that brown, or even better, black, mushy bananas always mean banana bread or cake, as Ronnie said, though I did not know of the freezing technique, which will be helpful.

I have recently started adding walnut bits to my banana bread, and found that to be wonderful.

But, for me, bananas are a winter fruit for my cereal. Right now, I am berry, berry happy.

dicksond wrote:as Ronnie said, though I did not know of the freezing technique, which will be helpful

Butch,

We usually freeze old bananas because, at that point, if we leave the aging bananas out another day, they would liquefy and flow away from the fruit bowl.

The Wife makes a killer banana bread; so good, in fact, that neighborhood children used to request it for their birthdays. My daughters have now taken up the standard, and they usually add chocolate chips to the bread, which I'm embarrassed to say, I actually like quite a lot.

Hammond

We freeze our brown bananas in the skin. It is much easier to handle during the thawing process and the result seems the same in the cooked banana bread or cake. there was a discussion on Chowhound a year or two ago about whether to freeze them with or without the peel. The votes were evenly split and my wife and I had differing opinions on this issue. After trying both ways, we now freeze in the skin exclusively.

Milt wrote:We freeze our brown bananas in the skin. It is much easier to handle during the thawing process and the result seems the same in the cooked banana bread or cake.

Milt, I always freeze bananas with the skin on. As you say, it's easier, and it would seem to me that the skin provides an extra layer of protection against freezer burn.

Hammond

I would have to go with Clara Daane's banana pudding, if'n I ever got to the stage of having spotted bananas on hand.

Bananas
Nilla Wafers
Vanilla Pudding
Baked with a meringe on top.

Intentionally, no measurements are provided.

I just made Lemony Olive Oil Banana Bread from 101 Cookbooks. I left out the chocolate so I could eat it for breakfast, and didn't glaze it because I had leftover lemon curd to spread on it instead. It's really quite tasty.
http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/le ... ecipe.html

I have discovered it is easiest to freeze the overripe bananas skin on. Leave them out to thaw completely; snip off one end and then empty the skins like a tube of toothpaste. Easy and (relatively) mess-free.

Gypsy Boy wrote:I have discovered it is easiest to freeze the overripe bananas skin on. Leave them out to thaw completely; snip off one end and then empty the skins like a tube of toothpaste. Easy and (relatively) mess-free.

I've also found that a short blast in the microwave will soften the frozen banana enough to get it out of the skin. We always have bananas in the freezer because I usually buy too many at a time.

I run them under hot water until the skin softens a bit, and ziiiiiip it right off.

Banana ice cream.


http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-make-creamy-ice-cream-w-93414