Color photograph of a bunch of bananas (genus Musa) and an individual banana, partially peeled, from the volume 'Birds and Nature, ' published by AW Mumford and illustrated, via color photography, by William Kerr Higley, 1900. Courtesy Internet Archive. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
Food - Drink
Why You Should Think Twice Before Freezing Whole Bananas
By CLAIRE REDDEN
When you grab a batch of bright yellow bananas on your weekly trip to the grocery store, it’s only a matter of days before they go brown. While a common solution for overripe bananas is to make banana bread, another option is to freeze them, which offers many different ways to reuse your bananas — but it depends on how you do it.
You can freeze your bananas either sliced or whole, but either way, you’ll want to do so only once they’ve become slightly overripe with brown spots on their skins, which is when their flavor is most pronounced. You should only freeze your bananas whole if you’re making banana bread because you'll just mash the whole frozen bananas as you usually would.
Conversely, if you want to use your frozen bananas for a morning smoothie, you should slice them so that the blender can blend them more easily and without wearing out the blades more quickly than usual. To prevent them from sticking together, simply arrange them on a tray and freeze them separately.