Like most things in life, peeling and dicing a banana is much easier and more elegantly done once someone shows you the 'secret.' Once revealed, this 'secret' feels so obvious it is hard to imagine how you ever did it any other way. Embarrassment can rear its ugly head as hindsight proves once again that it is 20/20.
Back to the banana, yes? Bananas have always been a sort of step-child fruit.The almost instant browning once cut, the delicate nature of the skin-so easily bruised. The. Worst. Fruit. Ever. for lunch bags, becoming brown and slimy under the pressure of backpacks and ethylene off-gassing. Even in a banana split, bananas play second fiddle to the strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, whip and cherries. Often either too hard-leaving a chalky taste and unpleasant mouth feel, or too soft-treacle sweet and slimy, bananas can be hard to love. Even as age convinces us that the potassium load of the banana will help with aging and leg cramps, there are those who can only abide them in smoothies, ground beyond recognition and masked by blueberries or blended into banana bread, greatly enhanced by butter and walnuts.
If you are an environmentalist the 'carbon footprint' of the banana is almost as hard to stomach as an unripe banana. Tropical by nature, banana crops are ripped from the rain forests and travel by cargo ship, train and diesel truck to your local Winn-Dixie. The distribution process is nuts! Harvested hard as a rock, they travel many a mile from their roots to end up in your cereal bowl. The incredible variety of bananas around the world (not all of them super tasty, and many with gigantic seeds) have been poked, prodded and modified to create the incredibly boring, relatively tasteless and generally more sturdy Cavendish. So perfect, in fact, that it is on the verge of extinction. Fungus is destroying crops so genetically identical, not a single plant has an idea of how to fight back. Is it worth it? Can't we just live and let grow? They have passed beyond the curiosity they once were and the colonialism of the 'banana republic' and into the international world market, only to be available at your local gas station counter for $0.99 each? Food for thought.
Barring banana apocalypse, let's discuss consumption methods. Kids and athletes often just peel and eat in the skin, bruising the fruit while bending the stem back and forth for the big reveal. Peeling down the sides, always wary of hidden bruises and nasty stringy bits. This method can be almost as unpleasant as drinking milk straight from the paper carton. Moms often slice through the stem, efficiently peeling the whole thing back before cutting mismatched circles to put on morning cereal. The nice moms cut out the slimy bruises. Problem is, those circles of banana are often much to big, taking up so much room on the spoon that you can never really get the optimum cereal/banana ratio. What to do?
And here lies the 'secret' you've been holding out for. That thing both so obvious and such a miracle that you want to shout it from the rooftops. Oh-and no pictures because the beauty is in the doing, not the watching.
Step One-useful for kids and athletes as well as those searching for the perfect cereal topping
Instead of trying to open the banana from the the stem end, bruising the fruit (sometimes to complete mush), use your thumbnail (or a knife, I suppose) to open from the bottom/flower end. No muss, no fuss. Peel as usual, but backwards.
-respectful pause to ponder the simplicity of this life altering suggesting-
Step Two- If you look closely at a cross-section of a banana, those tiny little seeds form a little star shape. It turns out that a banana is sectional! Kind of like an orange, but totally different. Take your pointer finger and gently push it into the end of the banana. Follow the curve of the banana with your finger. If it cooperates like it should, the fruit will split into thirds, making little triangle ribbons. If you want a larger target, simply cut the banana in half to reveal a nice circular target for your finger. Slice into delicate little triangles and voila! bite size bits that should make everyone happy. You might never want to eat a banana any other way, except maybe at the bottom of a split.
No comments:
Post a Comment