Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimzone7
Chong: Sound like a great way to test for taste, before going to alot of work preparing a "banana heart" dish.
Does this work for edible bananas only? I'm curious about basjoo, one of mine flowered this past month and my area will have a freeze real soon. Anything I can do to justify cutting it down will make that cut easier to take.
Jim
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Hello Jim,
As a matter of fact, the preferred banana flower for cooking in the Philippines is the one from a seeded variety called "Butuhan", which literally translates to "seeded". They are more expensive if harvested
before the bud opens and have produced fruit. So, if your Basjoo has a bloom and you are wondering if you can harvest the flower, you may be in a better shape to harvest it now. If there are some fruits, you can leave them on the plant, and see if they'll ripen in the summer. That's assuming that you've protected it it sufficiently so that it goes into a slow growth mode in the winter.
According to Asaccom, a member here, Basjoo fruits are sweet, although quite seeded. The Butuhan is not quite as seeded as the Basjoo. The Butuhan is only about 25% seeds. Gabe says that Butuhan is M. Balbisiana, but I have seen some pictures of Balbisiana and they are heavily seeded. If I ever get any fruit from the Balbisiana that I bought from Gabe, I will be able to determine if it is the same as the Butuhan.
I think the term "edible banana" is quite subjectively applied to bananas. E.g., the Butuhan fruit is eaten out of hand in the Philippines. It doesn't have to be cooked, but sometimes, half ripe fruits are placed over charcoal to cook them. Except for the flower, Butuhan fruit is seldom seen in the marketplace. They are 10 to 12 inches long and around 2 inches in diameter. The fact that they are seeded does not make them inedible, in the sense that they are not toxic. I would consider bananas that taste bitter, and/or "putrid", for lack of a better word, inedible.
Chong