Out of the Box
I removed the home-grown bananas on the right this morning from a box they’d been sharing for the past four days with a couple of apples.
As mentioned in the post below, ethylene gas given off by the apples helps speed the banana ripening process. Look at the photo down below to see how much their color changed in just a few days.
The bananas at your left were purchased from Kroger. As you can see, this home-grown variety yields fatter, flatter and a bit shorter fruit than the commercial types found in groceries. The flesh is pure white, slightly drier than the commercial types and slightly denser, too. I’d say on a sweetness scale of 1-10, with commercial bananas rating an 8, these home-growns are probably 7.5. Others, such as our Raja Puris, I would rate as sweeter than the commercial types – maybe a 9 on the scale.
As I noted earlier, we have no idea what the variety in the picture is, as its roots sneaked under a fence from our neighbor’s yard. But the quality of the fruit and its cold-hardiness definitely make it a keeper in my opinion.
While neither of our back-yard banana types produce much more than, say, seven “hands” of fruit in any individual bunch, the commercial types grown by Chiquita et al may have up to 20 hands and weigh more than 100 pounds per bunch.
The New York Times, Popular Science and other publications have been reporting lately (and just a little breathlessly, I would say) that the banana is headed for extinction because of disease that threatens to wipe it out.
It isn’t true, though. There are hundreds of types of bananas, and while the Cavendish varieties apparently are at risk for one or two serious fungal diseases, there are lots of other good-tasting bananas that aren’t threatened – several that taste better than the Chiquitas. As for the Cavendish, there are lots and lots of sub-types, and not all are as susceptible to the fungus among us.
We Americans eat a lot of bananas, true, but if the big growers couldn’t supply them for two or three years because they had to replant other types, my guess is we can survive on other fare.
Or eat what we have out back.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 14, 2008, 06 04 am
