We grow bananas in a banana circle, which receives all the water from our shower/bath/spa, such that even in the worst clutches of the drought the water hungry bananas did OK. A few days ago we had a beautiful bunch ripen up, they started forming last autumn and held on through winter to ripen up as spring has come in. And there were a lot of them.
They are small, and while they are not super sweet they are sweet enough, have a fruity tang and are quite banana-ry! Before you ask, I have no idea what variety they are. Most were gifts from friends which sat in around they front yard for ten years doing nothing, before being transplanted out the back. For the last few years they have been bearing and dying so even if I did know the varieties originally (which I didn’t) they would be so messed up by now I would still have no idea. Anyway…..
To dry the bananas I use our offset solar food dehydrator, which uses no power at all, but I do need a good sunny day for it to work at its best.
A review of the books on food drying which we have seemed to have the consensus of: peel ‘em, cut ‘em into 3mm strips lengthways, dip the strips in lemon juice and dry them at 50⁰C for about 15 hours. I believe the lemon juice is to prevent the banana slices going brown.
I basically did a similar thing.
They are only 80mm long by 30mm wide, skin and all, so after peeling I sliced them into 3 slices lengthways, of roughly (very roughly!) equal thickness, dipped them in lemon juice which was provided in a timely manner by our dwarf lemon tree. I just squeezed the juice into a bowl then dipped the slices in. I then placed them on the mesh screen.
The slicing pattern I used meant I had two sides which hat the outside skin on one side and the cut flesh on the other. Most of these I placed cut flesh side down onto the screen – trap for young players – as they dried they stuck to the screen. I was able to remove them with the use of a spatula, but for the others I placed them skin side down on the screen and they were much easier to remove. Obviously the central slice had two cut sides, but as they were a bit thicker that were also a bit easier to remove.
It took two days of reasonably good sun to dry the banana slices to the point where they were leathery, and I removed them from the drier and took them inside on the afternoon of the first day and replaced them in the drier the following morning.
By and large the process was fairly easy and quite effective. The dried banana slices are sitting in two glass jars awaiting use.
