Did you get a bunch of bananas from the Community Fridge? And now you’re wondering what to do with them? We asked our community Facebook group what they do with rescued bananas. Here are the top suggestions for how to stop bananas ending up as food waste.
1. Smoothie
Banana smoothies are a great way to use bananas. Put them in a liquidiser or blend with a stick blender, with coconut milk, ginger, a little bit of cinnamon and whizz it up! You can also use oat milk.
2. Banana cake
There are lots of recipes online for banana cake. Pick your favourite and mash those bananas ready for baking!
3. Freeze them
If you aren’t ready to use your bananas in baking right now, you can freeze them.
You can freeze them whole by just chucking them in the freezer in their skins. When you want to defrost them, pop them in a bowl to come back to room temperature. They will be incredibly mushy. Peel of the skin and squeeze out the fruit into your recipe.
Alternatively, peel and slice the banana and freeze them in chunks. This is the best way to do it if you want a few slices to throw into a smoothie from time to time.
4. Banana Brownies
Is there a better combination than bananas and chocolate? Use your favourite brownie recipe and add bananas, or look for a banana brownie recipe that will help you use up your stash.
5. Muffins
Grab and go muffins make a great choice for breakfast or a healthy afternoon snack.
6. Pancakes
Blend mashed banana into your pancake batter. You don’t add a lot of flavour to the pancake this way but it will taste faintly of banana, so keep this mix for sweet toppings.
7. Ice cream
Classic banana ice cream (or nice cream if you don’t have an ice cream maker) is lovely on a hot day.
8. On bread
Make a banana and peanut butter sandwich or have a sliced banana on toast sprinkled with brown sugar.
9. Waffles
If you have a waffle maker, add a couple of mashed bananas to your waffle batter mix. You can replace one of the eggs with banana and the results will still be just as good. They also freeze really well.
10. Banana wine
We haven’t tried this ourselves, but one of our Facebook community recommended banana wine as a way to use up the leftovers. If you try it, why not let us know how it turns out?