Freezing Bananas
Freezing Bananas for your own Home-Made Smoothies and Recipes
Freezing bananas for smoothies and other great, creative home-made recipes can really be a great way to save money and good nutritious treats to your family’s diet. You would be surprised how many different uses you can have for frozen fruits and vegetables. If you are the sort of person who likes to experiment with different kinds of food preparation, this may be just the thing for you.
Why Freeze Bananas
People often freeze bananas when they either buy them when they are too ripe or when they buy too many and they want to keep them from going bad. Sometimes you just think your family is going to eat more bananas than they do. Maybe your kids spend extra time that week at friends’ houses or are just not in a banana mood.
Regardless of the reason, one of the basic rules you should follow in running a household, is that you never want anything you paid for to go to waste. That even includes bananas. Rather than just let them sit there and get brown, you can freeze them and find other uses for them.
How to Freeze Bananas
Freezing bananas is a cinch. Just peel them, plop them whole into a zip lock bag, and toss them in the freezer and your done. Peel, plop, toss. It’s as simple as that.
Freezing Bananas for Smoothies
Perhaps the best use for frozen bananas is for home made smoothies. You just take them out of the freezer and plop them in the blender, and then toss ice cubes in with them and blend. And there you go; it’s as easy as that. Plop bananas, toss ice cubes, blend. Yum!
Freezing Bananas for Banana Pops
Here’s another great idea. Cut your bananas down the middle and shorten them so that they will fit into that popsicle tray. Stick Popsicle sticks into them and then slide the banana popsicles into the tray and mix with Cool-Aid. (You choose the flavor.) If necessary, use a layer of saran wrap to help fix the positioning of the Popsicle stick.
Now next time the kids come running in out of the summer heat, you have a nice sweet treat. Don’t forget, bananas are loaded with calcium so they are great for growing bones.
Freezing Banana Splitsicles
Here’s a variation on the banana popsicles. Cut your bananas in half. Then take a Popsicle stick and bury them firmly in the banana half. Then get some dipping chocolate (the kind people use for dipping strawberries) and dip your banana in it. Be sure to get a nice even coating of chocolate. Then, gently roll your banana in chopped nuts. (Be sure not to get the salted kind.) Then wrap your banana splitsicles in saran wrap and place them in an area of the freezer where they won’t get jostled. In a few hours you will have a delicious desert.
Freezing Bananas for Banana Bread
Another great recipe you can use frozen bananas to create is banana bread. Just prepare your bread mixture and before you place it in the oven, mix in banana bits. I personally like to cut the frozen banana into round chips and place them in the bread in that way, but I’ve seen a lot of people break them into smaller chunks.
These are only some of the great ways you can use frozen bananas. So next time you have some extra bananas you have a feeling no one will get to eating, just peel them, and pop them in the freezer. There’s no reason anything should go to waste.