Beware Frozen Bananas

Spotty bananas ripe for freezing

My favorite trick to making smoothies is to use frozen chunks of banana.  I let the bananas get really really ripe, until they are covered with dark spots.  Then I peel them, and cut them into chunks before freezing.

Frozen bananas defrosted and peeled

One day, ripe organic bananas were on sale for 0.49/lb. So I couldn’t resist buying a bunch, intending to make smoothies with them. As I had them on the counter ripening, and there were several of them, I wondered if I could use them for baking. I did some googling, and found that people do use frozen bananas for baking, and in fact said they freeze them whole (in their skin).

So I decided to try that, as it would save the extra step of peeling and cutting the bananas.  Later, I took my whole frozen bananas from the freezer, let them defrost on the counter for about 45 minutes, and made banana cake.

Mashed frozen bananas

However, I will never ever freeze bananas in their skin. To just be blunt, the defrosted skin was really slimy and horribly gross to touch. But once I got past that, the resulting banana cake was wonderfully moist and delicious, the same as made with fresh bananas.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any photographs of the finished cake because I was more interested in eating it than photographing it