It seems that every time I go to the
Avondale Sunday Market, I see something new and inspiring. I'm not the only one bubbling with excitement, because a couple of other bloggers have already beaten me to a post. I too bought the curious winged beans and fresh bamboo shoots that
Lauraine Jacobs found, though I somehow managed to overlook other things she mentioned, like galangal (I've been searching for this for ages!) and kaffir limes. I also failed to see the Black Doris plums that
Anna King Shahab wrote about, but I did discover something neither of them mentioned, which I had no idea was available here: banana flowers!
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| Bamboo shoots, banana flowers, bitter melons, silk melons and more. |
I find that a lot of the time, I have no idea what is being sold, because often there is no sign, or only a price, or only a description in a foreign language. I was particularly embarrassed once, when I asked what a vegetable was called, only to be told it was watercress! But I had seen the distinctive banana flowers (also called banana hearts, or inflorescence if you want to be scientific) before in Vietnam, so I knew what they were when I saw them (though I also asked just to be sure).
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| Banana flower with a couple of bracts taken off. |
Preparing a banana flower was very educational and interesting in itself. I did not realise how many of the purple bracts (often incorrectly called petals) you had to take remove before you reached the pale coloured edible portion. There was a row of yellow flowers between underneath each bract I removed, the female ones of which could have developed into fruit.
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| The banana flower had significantly reduced in size by the time I reached a bract that only had a hint of purple. |
I kind of wish I'd kept peeling (though it was getting pretty difficult to detach the bracts), because I would have quite liked to see what it looked like in the middle, but I decided to follow
this recipe for a Vietnamese banana flower salad, which told me to thinly slice the flower into rings. The cut surface oozed a sap, which is sticky and apparently turns black on exposure to air and can stain your hands, though I didn't try to confirm this.
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| The cut end of the flower oozed a sap. |
The centre of the cut surface began to come off in little bits as I went along, which I removed as instructed.
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| Tiny rings in the centre of larger ones. |
Then I discovered why I was told to stop slicing after getting three-quarters of the way down. There were barely any out rings left at all by this stage.
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| Cross section of banana flower three-quartersof the way down. |
Although placing the banana flower slices into diluted lemon/lime/tamarind juice was supposed to stop them turning brown, though they did darken noticeably anyway. It also apparently removes the sticky juice and tart taste.
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| Banana flower slices floating in lemon juice and water. |
Here is the finished product, served in one of the outer bracts, like a banana boat. It was delicious, though the crisp banana flower slices were subtle in flavour and could probably have been substituted with julienned green papaya or choko.
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| Vietnamese banana flower salad, with mint and Thai basil, garnished with crispy fried shallots. |
I threw away the tiny rows of flowers (the immature fruit), but I noticed afterwards that Indian recipes call for cooking them, and don't seem to use the inner bracts. Maybe I'll try this next time, though a
vazhaipoo curry is a rather unattractive name for a banana flower curry.
