Thursday, February 6, 2014

Caramelized Bananas

After dinner every so often, I want a little dessert.  I hate buying cakes and that sort of thing because they sit around the house for days and I feel compelled to continue eating it.  I had a dessert at a Thai restaurant one night that inspired making the bananas at home.  At the Thai restaurant, the banana is cut into large chunks, battered, deep fried and then drizzled with chocolate sauce and honey.  Sounds fabulous doesn't it?  Well, I'll leave that much work to the restaurant but feel free to try it if you want.  What I did discover is that bananas get very soft and decadent when they're cooked.  They turn almost creamy.  I love it.  That prompted me to quarter a banana one night, throw a fist full of brown sugar into a pan with a tablespoon of butter and give it a shot.  My first attempt, I had the sugar and butter melted and then I added the banana and cooked until it was soft.  The caramel turned to hard candy and it was almost impossible to eat.  Almost but I was a trooper and made it through it.  Then I thought, I need something to make the caramel creamy so the next time, I melted the butter and sugar and then poured in some milk.  It didn't look like it was going to work at first.  It seemed like I had milk and butter and sugar in a pan but I kept stirring over medium heat and it came together nicely.  I then added the bananas again and after tossing them around for a bit, knew that it was time to take them out as soon as they were getting hard to turn (because they were so soft).  I had some whipped cream in a canister in the fridge so I put that on but it also goes nicely with vanilla or even better, coconut ice cream.  But, it's also good by itself.

No comments:

Post a Comment