I made a loaf of delicious banana bread today, it came out great. But I really am itching to know something I have been wondering pretty much all my life- this recipe asks for smashed bananas and when the cake/bread is done, all these brown squiggly lines appear, in the cake itself. I looked carefully at the banana in its raw mashed state and I am pretty sure there was nothing like that there.
What are these brown squiggles, why do they appear only after the banana is cooked (apparently)?
Thank you in advance,
No - they’re much thinner and tinier in a way that couldn’t result from the volume lost when cooking. I’ve always assumed it’s full-length version of the tiny brown things you see near the center of a banana slice, (see here for a photo) arranged neatly around where the seeds would be if commercial banana varieties weren’t seedless.
As I recall from when my kids were little, banana bits soon become a brown color, (and make a nasty stain). So maybe those are just fibrous bits of the banana.
That’s what I thought too- but when I mashed the bananas, I looked really carefully, I saw NO brown bits or any features at all besides lumps. My bananas didn’t have those dark specks at the center that the ones in the photo you linked to have, either- upon pre-mashing inspection, that is.
