I went grocery shopping today, and while in the produce section, I saw a lady buying bananas by the bag, rather than by the bunch. Kind of like picking out oranges from bulk section rather than the bagged section.
That is, she was inspecting the banana bunches, finding the banana that best met her needs and put into a plastic bag. Lather, Rinse, and Repeat on the next bunch of bananas.
She had two bags of bananas, probably about 16 bananas total, in bunches of 1.
I have been buying bananas nearly every week for the last 25 years and I have never seen anyone do this. usually they just inspect the bunch, and pick one with the right ripeness and quantity and buy the whole bunch.
As I started to think about it, it made sense, but if it made sense, why haven’t I seen anyone else do it.
I couldn’t decide what forum this goes in but I think it is too mundane and pointless for Cafe Society and IMHO.
I’ve seen this done on a smaller scale, people pick a large bunch and pull off a few that they don’t want for some reason. The store may not even care. Many throw away any bananas that are ripe (why on earth I don’t know).
I buy small bunches, so I don’t mind. But it does seem kind of silly. Bananas are pretty hardy and tend to ripen with their bunch-mates. Unless you are super uptight about your banans, I can’t imagine the quality from one bunch to another being worth picking through them.
I presume to waste that much time it must be driven by some minor obsession. Like the woman I work with. She often brings a banana to work for her morning or afternoon snack. If when she goes to eat it it has developed even the slightest un-yellow spot she gives it to me.
If you’d like to know a trick…everyone likes to eat bananas at a certain level or ripeness. When they get to the level (or ‘stage’ in industry speak) that you like, put them in your fridge. You can either leave them in there or wait for them to get a slight gray tinge to them. At that point you can take them back out and they will ripen no more. At my store if they accidentally get chilled before they ripen (and we can tell by the gray color) we just toss them, nothing we can do about it at that point.
They’ll be ugly, but taste just fine.
You know how once in a while you get a bunch of bananas that sit around in your kitchen for weeks and never seem to ripen, that’s what happened. At some point in their life they got cold.
So she’s yet another person who doesn’t know that a banana isn’t ripe until it starts turning a little bit brown.
I thought maybe it was just different definition of ripeness, but my dad brought home some from his work that were too brown to sell, and they were perfect.
Which is kind of a problem if you live alone and like them within a certain range of ripeness–you wind up eating some of them greener than you like and some of them riper than you like. If you buy them from different bunches, at different stages of ripeness, though, then you can get most of them at about your preferred state of ripeness. I personally don’t care nearly enough about the ripeness of my nanners to go to that sort of hassle, but I see how some folks might. After all, I do it with peaches and plums.
I pull the bunch apart when I get it home and set them on the counter not touching each other. This seems to slow them down and keep them from getting over ripe long enough for me to enjoy one per day throughout the week.
Separating bananas does slow down the ripening process. They naturally put off the gas ethylene which ripens them. They also ripen other fruits as well, so putting a bunch in with your apples and oranges will make rot faster.
Keeping them close together will maintain a higher concentration of ethylene around them and in theory could cause them to ripen faster. But as long as there is adequate airflow in the area, I think the difference would be fairly minimal. Noticeable maybe, but minimal.
ETA, I read that as “doesn’t slow down” instead of “does slow down”, so, nevermind.
When bananas get “too ripe” I peel them, put them in a ziplock bag and freeze them. Then, when I need a banana to put into a smoothie, oatmeal, etc I just remove what I need.
