Go Bananas!

Someone told me that bananas are a smart food because they’re good for you if you need to go AND they’re good for you if you need to stop going. Maybe my uncle told me that. Maybe not. I do know that bananas are the perfect food to span the ages from infant who has no teeth to grandpa who has a heart condition.

Bananas are a year-round food in my grocery store. They come pre-packaged, just peel and eat, you don’t have to rinse them or refrigerate, and you can grab a single or a six-pack. I don’t know what the nutritional value of a banana is, but it’s got to be higher than a Snickers bar, yet a banana fits just as nicely in the grasp of your hand.

Clearly there are advantages to bananas over other foods. Probably they’re the primordial fruit of Adam and Eve, before the snake corrupted early hu-man and early hu-woman with the apple.

However, bananas have a limited shelf life, or countertop span in the case of my kitchen. From the time that first freckle begins to show, bananas are strictly verboten as edible substance in my household of fruit-critics, unless they are baked in banana bread.

I had a professor who ate his bananas only black. People used to put bananas in his mailbox while he was on sabbatical. He’d return to a collection of black-ripe bananas waiting for him right next to grant proposals and dissertation drafts.

Theoretically all the sugars don’t develop until the skin darkens, but I like bananas golden yellow. They seem starchy to me beyond that. Nevertheless, black is when you bake them into bread. They’re a little nothing while they’re still freckled, and they’re a lot of nothing in bread before they’ve gone spotted, yielding small to no flavor to the bread. The bananas have to be black for bread baking.

I imagine it’s like onions: even the strongest onion will mellow into sweetness as it cooks into translucence. Try baking onions in muffin tins with butter and cinnamon on top.

Regardless, banana bread is the best way to share a rotten banana.