banana

Two smoothies in this library use Musa acuminata, each at 120 grams, one banana. In the strawberry banana smoothie it goes in frozen beside 150 grams of frozen strawberry, 240 ml of milk and 12 grams of chia, and the recipe's fix for a blend that is too thin is more frozen banana. In the green protein smoothie it goes in fresh and peeled, after the kale has been blended into the milk until it vanishes, with mango, whey and collagen; there banana and mango do all the sweetening, so nothing else has to. The recipes name one compound for it, isoamyl acetate, the ester behind ripe banana's smell and taste.

The Journal's note on banana varieties starts with a wild banana that breaks a tooth: a slim green case of hard black seeds around a little pulp. Parthenocarpy, setting fruit without pollination, produced fewer seeds and more flesh, and phytoliths in garden mounds at Kuk Swamp in the New Guinea highlands show bananas cultivated between 6,950 and 6,440 years ago. Sterility came from crossed subspecies, so every Cavendish on earth is one clone. The smell is mostly one ester, isoamyl acetate. The note takes apart the story that banana candy tastes wrong because it was modelled on Gros Michel: the earliest banana-essence formula it cites dates from 1859, four decades before Gros Michel dominated the American market, and a 2014 investigation found no source for the story.

The Journal's note on bloating adds a caution for smoothie makers. Monash retested banana in 2017 and split it in two: firm banana rates low, while ripe banana is high in fructans, because cold storage and ripening build them, and its serve is a third of one. The note's low-FODMAP glass says no banana unless it is firm.