Make Basic Bananas Extra Flavorful With One Spice From Your Cabinet

Bananas are one of the most versatile ingredients you can keep in your kitchen. You can use them to make healthy pancakes, sweet muffins, breads — they can even be blended into a two-ingredient frozen dessert. While bananas are naturally sweet, the flavor can be enhanced with a range of pantry staples. Cinnamon is a classic pairing, but there's another warming spice that really amps up the flavor and creates a whole new experience: cardamom.

I discovered this combination while working at one of the busiest bakeries in San Francisco, where we kept huge boxes of bananas on hand to fuel our famous coffee cakes. I experimented with the fruit in so many different ways, using it to make pastry creams, frangipanes, and even cold brew. Cinnamon often found itself into the mixing bowls, but cardamom was also one of our most-used spices. I loved the pairing and still find ways to incorporate the combination into my home baking today.

Cardamom is a sweet, floral spice that comes from seeds in the ginger family. It's common in Indian and Middle Eastern cooking and Scandinavian baking, lending to both sweet and savory applications. The earthy aroma really complements the natural sugars in bananas, adding a nice warmth and almost smoky complexity to the fruit. Cardamom also provides a delicate but bright, citrus-like punch that cuts through rich batters, like those used for brown butter banana bread and banana crumb muffins.

You can incorporate cardamom into almost any banana-based recipe. I use it to make banana bread a lot, adding just a ¼ teaspoon to the batter. It also works incredibly well with pumpkin. You can combine the three together in Hayley MacLean's pumpkin banana bread recipe. Classic banana muffins are another great base that allows cardamom to shine — again, use just a pinch or so, as it's incredibly pungent. 

The other recipe I like to keep in my arsenal is a banana-cardamom coffee cake. Just add both ingredients to a basic coffee cake recipe, incorporating the spice into the crumb as well as the batter. In terms of more everyday uses, I make smoothies a lot and love to use a little in those too. A great one to throw together is banana, peanut butter, almond milk, honey, and cardamom, or else banana, cocoa powder, milk, espresso, and cardamom, depending on the time of day. 

The flavor works great sprinkled into fluffy banana pancakes, or on banana slices caramelized with butter and sugar (or coconut oil and honey for a healthier option). Serve those on yogurt or ice cream with your choice of nuts. A little shake of cardamom on a simple banana sandwich, a slice of toast, or a classic banana pudding also goes a long way. You can use it to finish a banana cream pie, as well. Just experiment and figure out what your favorite is.