Ripen bananas in 10 minutes ‘to dial up flavour’ with 1 kitchen appliance

Buying bananas at the supermarket may be a healthy choice, but it can be frustrating having to wait days to eat them because they’re not yet ripe.

But getting a perfectly ripe banana is often trickier than you’d think, as they tend to still be quite firm and green when they’re sat on store shelves.

The easiest way to ripen them is to sit them in a fruit bowl and leave them for three to five days until they’re deliciously soft and yellow, but it can be easy to forget about them and by then it’s too late as they’ve turned mushy and brown.

If you find yourself falling into this annoying trap when buying bananas, there is another way to ripen them which will only take you a maximum of 10 minutes – and all you’ll need is one kitchen appliance.

According to the foodie website Bon Appétit, roasting bananas for five to 10 minutes in the oven will leave them deliciously sweet and soft inside.

Associate food editor Kendra Vaculin recommends roasting a whole bunch of unripened bananas at once. The bananas should be separated with their skins left on, and simply need to be placed on an oven tray and roasted in the oven at 250C until they’re just warm, for around five to 10 minutes.

Vaculin says this quick blast in the heat will help the bananas to soften just enough without turning them into a mushy pulp.

If you want to intensify the banana flavour and add the fruit to a banana bread mixture, you can try roasting them for around an hour.

Again, leave the skins on and leave the fruit in the oven until the skins have turned completely black. Vaculin says this longer stint in the oven will “dial up the flavour”, producing a sweet, caramelised taste.

If you do this, just be mindful that the bananas will shrink to around half their size in the heat, so if you want to use the fruit for baking, it’s worth roasting a bit more than the recipe states.