Monday, August 18, 2008

How to clean the banana flower?

Banana flower is otherwise called banana blossom or plantain flower or banana heart .The tamil name is Vaazhai poo (vaalai poo).In addition to the fruit, the flower of the banana plant is used in Southeast Asian, Tamil, Bengali and Kerala (India) cuisine, either served raw with dips or cooked in soups and curries.
Cleaning the banana blossom is a challenging task for every beginner.
So I am explaining it with images.



Wash the entire flower under running water.Apply some oil on your hands to avoid discoloration of skin.
Remove and discard the red bracts.
Gather all the small flowers inside. If not used they would have grown into individual sweet bananas.
You can peel up blossom to certain limit only, then leave the cone as it is.
carefully open each white blossom. You may see a plastic textured petal and a hard stamen. Just remove both.






Discard the above and collect the soft flowers.




Take 2 cups of water and mix 1 tablespoon of yogurt to it.
Immerse the cleaned banana flowers in to the solution.,
This is done to prevent the oxidation of the flower.
Chop the cleaned plantain flowers and the inner cone.
This chopped banana flower can be used to make curry, fry, vazhai poo vadai, soup etc.


Image shows the typical Indian style Plantain flower poriyal

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

wonderful viki! I know to do this curry, but dont know how to clean this.....Your step by step procedures with photos helped me in doing this curry....Mmmm....Awesome taste....Thanks viki!

Vikis Kitchen said...

Hi kavitha ,Thanks for dropping by. I am happy that you like this posting.Keep visiting.

dsdsds said...

Wow Viki.. I know its a bit late for comments. But I was desperately searching for cleaning the flower. I barely found instructions. Yours is very clear. Will be very helpful for beginners. Will link it to your post in my blog too

Sandhya said...

The step by step instruction was very good. However i found that in Tamil Nadu only the flower part is used for cooking. In kerala we use the entire flower along with the red bracts for making poriyal. The only thing cleaned out is the stamen and the plastic like part that u have already mentioned. It has a very good taste as well. This way u get to use the entire flower for cooking.

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