Green banana flour.
It’s a lovely fine silky flour. It takes about 40 Cavs to make a kilo of flour and our bunches usually have well over 100 bananas, so it still leaves plenty for ripe eating and giveaways. It’s economic in time and energy cost and doesn’t require a whole lot of specialised equipment. And it fits a suburban homestead scale.
This has been a quest of mine for a little while. My coastal subtropical climate is all wrong for wheat or rice or most of the staple grain crops that anchor our Western diet. I can’t even really follow Irish tradition (and Peruvian before that) and use potatoes as the calorie base – potatoes are a seasonal treat here rather than a year-long storing staple. It’s easy to grow enough fruit, veg, herbs and eggs on a small suburban block. But to get enough of those starch staples, in this climate you need to think Africa, Carribean, Pasifika.
Sweet potatoes, cassava, taro, arrowroot, plantain all grow easily and work fine like potatoes in stews and soups and casseroles – my African neighbours will go for green banana in preference to potatoes any day. Sweet potatoes are delicious and easy to grown and have way more fibre and beta-carotene than potatoes. Cassava is resilient and high yielding. Taro copes with wet feet. Arrowroot is a bit too bland to be enticing except as a survival food but it grows so easily it is practically a weed.
But it has been a challenge to find a way to make flour. And I like flour.
This was made from Cavendish bananas, green but fully rounded out, sliced about 5mm thick and dried at 58°C (in a small home dehydrator using solar power) for about 8 hours, then milled in my new (to me) op shop Vitamix. (The Vitamix was a key – my early attempts using a lower speed blender just spun the dried banana round).
The flour tastes pretty much like wheat flour. It has no real banana flavour, just the very mild sweetness that goes with most starchy foods. Most of this will go in my crispbreads that are a staple in our household. In bunya season I have used bunya flour for them, but it’s not a good bunya season every year. Going on the principle that banana flour behaves much like bunya flour, it should work fine in pancakes and for thickening, and mixed with wheat flour (for the gluten) in pasta and noodles. I’m looking forward to seeing just how much I can do with it. Anyone with good recipes?
