I realized that I never answered the question of what to do with overripe bananas, and now I’m sure it’s way too late for the person who asked.  But I’ll answer now and in case another great deal on very ripe bananas comes along, you’ll have the suggestions already. And if you took my advice a while back and froze them, you might still have them waiting in the freezer, hoping for inspiration to strike so you could use them.  🙂

I’ve already posted about how to freeze bananas.  So in this post I’ll write about what to do with those wonderful bargains on very ripe bananas that you find. 

If you freeze them, you can then defrost them for using in banana bread, banana muffins, banana cake, and banana cookies.  You can use it for a breakfast of baked banana oatmeal.  You get the idea.  Anything you can bake can have a banana version!

Blend the frozen bananas to make banana ice cream.  Cut them in slices and eat them as a frozen treat, or dip them in a peanut butter sauce for a really special treat.  Insert a popsicle stick in the banana before freezing, dip into a chocolate or carob sauce, roll in dried coconut or walnuts, and you have a tasty dessert for kids. 

Bananas are perfect for smoothies and shakes – they add sweetness and creaminess.

Slice them up and put them in the dehydrator to make leathery banana chips.  Blend them , put them in the dehydrator on the paraflexx sheet and make fruit leather – we’ve found that using bananas for part of the fruit leather combination is the key to success since it holds together well.

These are some things that we’ve done when we’ve had a lot of ripe or overripe bananas (and I have a bunch on the counter right now waiting to be dealt with, so you now what will happen to some of them!).  There are lots of other ideas and if anyone has tips to share or recipes that they’ve especially enjoyed, please share them!

Avivah