Banana (ripe)
केला · வாழைப்பழம் · అరటిపండు · പഴം · ಬಾಳೆಹಣ್ಣು
Fresh Produce
Sweetener and binder in batters — sheera, appam, pancakes, banana buns. Ripe fruit, not the plantain: mashed it brings its own sugar and enough body to cut the egg or the leavening a batter would otherwise need.
What to know
It goes into a batter cold and mashed smooth, never sliced — a lump of banana in a pancake steams instead of cooking and leaves a wet patch.
- Choosing it
- For cooking, buy them speckled and soft — the ones nobody wants in the fruit bowl. A yellow-green banana is starchy rather than sweet and will leave the batter bland. Elaichi is firmer and less watery than robusta. Nendran is a separate purchase with its own entry: for anything sliced and fried rather than mashed, buy that instead.
- Storing it
- Room temperature, off the fridge, and away from other fruit — they ripen everything near them. Once speckled, peel and freeze the flesh if you cannot use it; it mashes fine from frozen.
- By eye
- 1 medium banana ≈ a heaped ½ cup mashed
- If you cannot get it
- Not interchangeable with raw-banana, which is the unripe plantain and is a vegetable, nor with nendran-banana, which is the large ripe cooking plantain.
Measures
- 1 piece ≈ 100 g
- 1 cup ≈ 190 g
Cups here are the Indian 200 ml cup, not the 240 ml US cup — a common reason a recipe does not work. Weigh where you can; the grams are the figure we cook to.