Flour milled from unripe bananas — dried and ground while the fruit is still green and starchy, long before it develops any sweetness. Naturally gluten-free.
It does not taste of banana
This surprises almost everybody, and it is the most useful thing to know before you buy. A banana's sweetness and its aroma both appear during ripening, as enzymes convert starch into sugar. Harvested green, the fruit is essentially a block of starch with a mild, slightly earthy, faintly grassy flavour — much closer to a plantain or a potato than to a dessert banana.
That is precisely what makes it useful in cooking. It behaves as a starch, not as a fruit.
What resistant starch is
Green banana is one of the richest ordinary sources of resistant starch — starch whose molecular structure means it passes through the small intestine largely undigested and reaches the large intestine intact, where the gut's bacteria ferment it. Functionally it behaves more like a fibre than like a starch.
One practical consequence: heating gelatinises the starch and reduces the resistant fraction, though some of it re-forms as the food cools. If that property is why you are buying it, use the flour raw — stirred into a smoothie or yoghurt — rather than baked. If you are buying it as a gluten-free flour, cook with it freely.
Baking with it — do not substitute one for one
Green banana flour absorbs a great deal more liquid than wheat flour and has no gluten to give structure. Replacing wheat flour with it measure for measure produces something dense and gummy.
Start by replacing about a quarter of the flour in a recipe, and expect to need a little extra liquid. In gluten-free blends it works well alongside rice flour and a binder. It is at its best in things that are meant to be moist and dense in the first place — brownies, banana bread, pancakes, muffins — rather than in anything that needs to rise.
A note on introducing it
Resistant starch is fermented by gut bacteria, and a large amount introduced suddenly can cause wind and bloating in people not used to it. Start with a teaspoon a day and build up.
Iswari
NOW Foods
Dragon Superfoods
