11–20 of 69 posts
I have been very curious to try a Gros Michel after learning that the common artifical banana flavor is supposed to taste like them, not like the post-Panama Disease bananas. I wonder how it is that we keep using this heirloom banana flavoring even after everyone's assumptions about what a proper banana tastes like changed.
I fell in love with Apple Bananas in Hawaii. Highly recommend. https://hawaiiancrown.com/apple-bananas/
I recently bought a batch of six bananas from a local farmer's market - they were very fresh and very green and smaller, having just been picked. I let them ripen at home over the next 3 days. They tasted very much better than my usual rather tasteless supermarket-bought bananas. I'm going to try the exercise again tomorrow to check whether this was a one-off or not. After reading the article, I'm going to check with…
PSA: unripe bananas are medicinal, if you struggle with a "sensitive GI tract" I highly recommend trying to eat an at least slightly green banana every morning.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/green-bananas-good-or-b...
I'm eager to try blue bananas! I hear they are great.
South India has a pretty diverse collection of banana species, even from my limited experience. You have red bananas; plantains; and these very small (some are about the length of a finger) and delicate yellow bananas known locally as Yelakki, among others.
> This is precisely what happened in the early to mid-20th century. Panama disease, a wilt-causing fungus, evolved to attack one Gros Michel banana tree. It was then able to infect all the Gros Michel banana trees which were planted in close quarters with one another on these massive banana plantations. Only by switching the crop to a new banana that American consumers would like [-Cavendish] —one that was similar to the Gros Michel in color and shape, but was genetically distinct from it—could the banana industry save itself from collapsing. In the process, though, we lost the better banana.