Bananas Stay Fresh For A Whole Month With This AMISH Trick!

There they are again on your counter, gone soft, the peels freckling brown, the tops giving way, and you know by tomorrow half of them will be sitting in a sad little pile by the sink, too mushy to eat and too good to throw out. And every time you walk past them you feel that small guilt because you meant to get to them and now they have beaten you to it. Most people will tell you the banana is the problem, that you bought too many, that you should have eaten faster, that fruit just does this and there's nothing to be done. That is not the real problem. The real problem is that nobody ever taught you how a banana ripens or the few simple things you can do to slow it down so one bunch feeds you for weeks instead of days. I am Esther Yoder and I keep house here in Lancaster County the old way, the way it was handed down to me. Before I show you, let me say this plainly. If you want my complete method for running a household on far less, I put it all in one place for you. Save $6,000 a year with my complete Amish home saving method. The link is right here EliasYoder.com. Go look when the video is done. Now one honest word so you trust me. There is no keeping a banana bright yellow with never a spot for a month. A banana ripens from the inside the way it was made to and the peel will freckle and darken no matter what. But a spotted peel is not a spoiled banana. Pull it open and the fruit is good, often sweeter. What I am promising you is this. You keep eating from one bunch the better part of a month, spots and all, instead of losing half of it the first week. And the very ripe ones at the end become bread, nothing wasted. Here is the one thing most people get wrong and once you know it the rest is easy. A banana ripens from the stem. That top knuckle where they all join, that crown, that is where the fruit breathes out the very thing that ripens it and its neighbors. Cover the tops and you slow the whole bunch down. Everything you are about to do serves that. Slow the breath, keep the fruit clean and dry so nothing molds, keep it cool and unbruised. Here is how you do it, step by step, all cheap and all with what you already have. First wash them. Fill a basin with cool water and stir in about two teaspoons of plain salt until it dissolves. Wash each banana gently, the whole peel, and let the crown sit in that salt water a minute or two. This does not stop ripening. What it does is clean off the dust and handling so nothing on the outside turns to mold while the fruit keeps. A clean banana keeps better than a dirty one. Second, dry them. This is the step most people skip and skipping it is why fruit molds. Take a clean towel and dry every banana all the way down into the crowns where the stems meet, bone dry. Any drop of water left sitting there is a place for mold to start. Wet fruit spoils, dry fruit keeps. Third, this is the one that does the real work, wrap the stems. Trim away any part of the crown that is torn or bruised then bind that crown up tight with plastic wrap sealing the tops away from the air. You are covering the very place the ripening comes from. You can do better still. Break the bananas apart one by one and wrap each single stem on its own. Separated and individually wrapped, each banana ripens on its own slow clock instead of pushing its neighbors along. A little more fuss but it is the difference between a few extra days and a good stretch longer. Fourth, store them right. Do not pile them in a heap. Every place one banana presses on another is a bruise waiting to brown. If you have a hook, hang them so they touch nothing and the air moves all around. No hook, lay them out single on a flat dish with space between, somewhere cool and dark and out of the sun. A sunny windowsill is the worst place you could put them. A cool dim corner of the with a little draft is near the best. Heat hurries fruit along, cool holds it back. Now I should say a word here for honesty's sake, the way I always do. Some folks will tell you to put bananas in the refrigerator. In my house we do not and here's the thing you should know. Cold will turn a banana's peel dark and blotchy fast, faster than the counter and it frightens people into thinking the fruit is ruined. It usually is not. The inside can still be fine but the peel goes ugly. If your bananas are already ripe and you want to stop them right where they are, the cold of an ice box will hold the fruit, dark peel and all. If they are still green, the cold can stall them so they never sweeten properly. So know what you are doing before you chill them. I would rather teach you to manage them on the counter the way the old women did before any of us had cold boxes at all. Do those things, clean, dry, wrap the crowns, keep them cool and apart and you will be eating from one bunch far longer than you are used to. The peels will spot, let them. A freckled banana is a sweet banana. You keep eating the good fruit inside right through and you stop throwing money in the trash every week. Now let me tell you who would rather you never learned any of this. Walk into any grocery and look at how the bananas are sold. They are sold to move. The store wants that bunch in your cart today and gone from your counter by week's end, soft and spotted and tossed so that you are back on Monday buying another. A banana that keeps three weeks in your kitchen is a banana you did not come back to buy. There is no man in a backroom scheming this. It is worse than a scheme because a scheme you could expose and end. This is just a system that runs itself. Everything about how that fruit is grown and shipped and shelved and priced is built around you using it up fast and returning soon and nobody has to coordinate a thing for it to work exactly that way. The waste is not your failing. The waste is the whole point for everyone but you. The old women kept food because food was dear and not to be lost. You can keep yours the same way and quietly step out of that current. So here's what I would ask of you. Go try this on the next bunch you buy. Wash them, dry them well, wrap the crowns, hang them cool and then come back down to the comments and tell me how long they held for you and tell me where you are while you are at it, your county and how old your house is. I love to know who is out there listening and what kind of roof you are keeping a home under. We have folks from all over now in old farmhouses and new little apartments alike and I read what you write and when the last few bananas finally go soft and dark and too ripe to want to peel and eat do not you dare throw them out. That is bread waiting to happen. Let me tell you how my mother turned the sorriest end of the bunch into the best loaf on the table. Take four or five of those very ripe bananas, peel them into a big bowl and mash them down with a fork until they are mostly smooth. The riper and darker they are the sweeter your bread so this is the good use for the very ones people throw away. Crack in an egg or two and pour in a little melted butter about a quarter cup and stir it all together. In another bowl put about a cup and a half of flour, a teaspoon of baking soda, a teaspoon of baking powder and a good pinch of salt and stir that. Then bring the dry into the wet a little at a time and fold it together until you have a thick batter. Do not beat it hard just bring it together. Butter a loaf pan, pour it in and if you want it pretty lay a few banana slices along the top. Cover it loose with a bit of foil and bake it in a moderate oven around 350 degrees for a little better than half an hour until a straw comes out of the center clean. Your whole kitchen will go warm and sweet with the smell of it and you will have turned the very part of the bunch the grocery counted on you to waste into something your family fights over that is the old way in one loaf. Nothing bought to be thrown out, everything made to last and what cannot last made into something better. The people who built this country with their hands, new things we are only just starting to remember and one of them is that there is no such thing as garbage in a kitchen run with care. There is only food you have not yet learned the use of. I will see you next time when I will show you how I keep a head of lettuce crisp in the cellar long past when it ought to have wilted. Until then go wrap those banana tops and write and tell me how they keep.