Bacon Wrapped Bananas with Chocolate Sauce

And doesn't that just sound AWESOMELY delicious? I know it does "it" for me! Seriously, what dish can't be improved by adding bacon?

I got the idea for this from a yoga teacher in New Zealand who has a cool food blog called Couscous & Consciousness. In one of her posts she asked folks about what trio or trios of food combination go well together. One of the ones I mentioned was bacon wrapped chocolate that gets battered and deep-fried. She thought it sounded ok but suggested some with bananas to go along with the bacon and chocolate.

Hence, this beauty of a recipe was born!

I made it last night, we all loved it. And that includes BIL who has a very fussy palate. In fact, he licked the plate clean!

Dingo Dave's Original Bacon Wrapped Bananas with Chocolate sauce with thanks to Couscous & Consciousness for inspiration.

What you need:

For the bananas and bacon:
One banana per person
1 to 3 slices of bacon per banana depending on size of slice

For the chocolate sauce:
175 grams of dark chocolate --that's 6.141592654 or pi+3 ounces
2 heaping tbsp butter
1/3 cup cream
1/4 cup cream port (or regular port, or a sherry variety)
1/4 tsp cinnamon powder
1/8 tsp cayenne powder (I usually double or triple this, but that's for when it's just me)

What you do:

Put everything for the chocolate sauce in a small, thick-bottomed saucepan. Your saucepan should now look like this:




Put the saucepan on the lowest heat possible and stir or whisk it while it heats. Make sure nothing sticks to the bottom and that it's well mixed. This should only take a couple of minutes.

Turn the heat off and cover it.

Now to assemble the bacon and bananas. Ummmmmm, this is pretty simple, just wrap the bacon around the bananas. If you need to secure the bacon with toothpicks the go for it.




Then cook them till the bacon is done to your liking. Be gentle when turning them as you don't want to bananas to break apart.




Remove the toothpicks if you used them and liberally ladle the sauce on top!

Notice how I used one dark plate and one light plate so that the color balance in the photo is way off? Yeah, I did that on purpose. Maybe.

And the obligatory closeup:




Use a sharp knife and a fork for eating. Why a sharp knife? So that you don't mush down the banana as you cut a piece.

You'll have lots of leftover sauce, I'm sure you'll think of some use for it.

Oh, next time I'm going to roll the bananas in brown sugar before wrapping the bacon around them!

Banana Whip

Do you have any mushy bananas laying around? Gotta couple of egg whites? Sugar? A bit of lemon or lime or orange juice?

If you answered yes, then you can make this RIGHT NOW!

Has anyone noticed just how simple and easy South Pacific cuisine is? Not to say it's not flavourful, but the cooking really let's the fresh food speak for itself.

Oh, here's a tip: you can freeze egg whites. Yup, the next time you are making something like hollandaise sauce and you are wondering what to do with the leftover egg whites just chuck em in the freezer for later use. Just make sure you put them in a container first, ahem.

This comes from Papua New Guinea, as does a great banana jam recipe I have (next time).

Banana Whip

What you need:
2 egg whites
1/2 cup sugar (I use raw, but feel free to use the refined stuff if you'd like)
4 mushy bananas
2 tbsp of lemon, or lime, or orange juice.

What you do:
Mix the egg whites and sugar together. Get your beaters out and whip it till you've got stiff peaks. Peel and mash the bananas and add to the whipped whites. Carefully mix together. Add the citrus juice and slowly mix again.

There! Done! This is tasty stuff. Add a dollop of this onto the top of pineapple sherbet and you'll be happy.

Bananas Flambe'

These are so easy and so tasty! You just need to make sure you've got good, solid bananas. If your 'nanners have gone too ripe, then make banana jam instead.

But, if you've got fresh, solid 'nanners, then try this:

Bananas Flambe --Dingo Dave style

What you knead:

Some firm bananas, pealed, and halved lengthwise
At least a half cup of butter
Half a cup (or so) of raw sugar
A splash of high quality rum

Before I start with the "what you due" section, there's a few points I'd like to write about regarding the above stuff.


Bananas vs plantains... Hey, anyone know Don King's phone number? Sounds like a good fight to me.

For those of you knot (not) in the know, a plantain IS a banana; just larger and starchier. musa paradisica is the latin term for a plantain. Since a plantain is much starchier (I love that word: STARCHIER) than a standard banana --musa sapientia-- you have to make sure it's cooked longer than a banana. So if you are using plantains in this recipe, make sure you slice them thinly and cook them longer.

Trivia: You've all scene (seen) seens (scenes) of a jungle on the Telly (TV) where banana trees abound --Oh Puuuuuh-leeeeaaaassssseeee try to say that fast! But it may interest you to know (and then again, maybe not) to learn that a banana plant is botanically classified as an HERB. Gotta love them big herbs. Yo, Herb! Is that you dude?

Next topic: sugar... raw sugar is what used to be known as brown sugar yonks ago (a long time ago). Brown sugar now means ugly refined sugar with ultra-processed molasses added --YUCK! So... Raw Sugar Is Cool.

High Quality Rum: I don't think I need to talk about the fact that 151 from the Windies is best, eh?

Oh crap, almost forgot: what do you get when you heat butter and sugar in a saucepan? You get butterscotch (duh). Guess what? It orginates from the same area as Scotch! You know: Scotland. Traditional butterscotch is a hard candy-like treat; the mixture is allowed to cool, then it hardens, then you eat it. The wonderful butterscotch topping that you are all familiar with that is put upon your ice cream has lemon juice and cream added to it while cooking the mix in a double boiler. Let me know if you want to know how to make your own, no worries.

Ok, back to the recipe:

What you due

Melt the butter and sugar in a fry pan. When it's melted, put the bananas in. Turn them after a few mins so that they are browned on both sides (hey, it's just sugar). Then toss in the splash of 151 dark rum (reserving enough for the cook), then light it (if you have a gas cooker you don't need to light it, it should light itself).

When the flames die down (die flames, DIE), serve it up over vanilla ice cream, making sure you pour lots of the flambe'ed butterscotch topping over it.

Enjoy!


BTW, I have gathered all the fixin's for this year's Holiday Feast. Well, except the fresh stuff, I'll be getting that daily. Anywho, starting Monday the Twenty-Oneth I'll start posting holiday recipes complete with pictures. I'll even give you detailed details on how to make WP's infamous Charlotte Rouse.

Banana Tart

I noticed a few days ago that one of my readers was interested in my banana tart recipe from my holiday feast. Since bananas are now back in season and cheap here right now (less than a buck a pound) then I thought this'd be a good time for the recipe.

The trick is the filling (the banana stuff). The casing is simple. Just get a pack of shortcrust pastry sheets, use a 3 inch cookie cutter, put the cut rounds into something like this:



Poke the bottoms a bit, and then bake in an oven till the pastry is done. Or you could do it even simpler: just go to the shops and get a pack of pack of pre-cooked tart shells. But they are much more expensive than the sheets.

Side note for suzer: you can get the above baking tray at Coles, they're around 6 dollars and last forever.

Now for the filling!

Firstly, make LOTS. This stuff is so good you'll be eating it by itself. The riper the banana is the better it tastes. Even the ones that are totally black on the outside are great to use.

For every pound of banana, you'll want 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar plus the juice of one lemon.

What do you do? Chop up your bananas (peel 'em first), and toss them, the sugar, and the lemon juice in a saucepan. Heat it up, stir FREQUENTLY. Keep it at a temp that's just bubbling the mixture. When it starts to a light orangish/reddish colour, then it's done (15 to 20 mins, the riper the banana the quicker it cooks).

Pour/spoon into a bowl and let it cool. Once it's cool, spoon it into the cooked pastry shells. Then eat! You can top them with whipped cream, that's good too.

The banana filling can be used for many things: ice cream topping, a spread on toast, filling in a flaky buttermilk biscuit, or just eat it as is. When I buy bananas I'll hide 5 or 6 of them and let them go black; THEN they are great for making the filling.