Snack Recipe: Magic Banana Smoothie
This is not a recipe so much as a secret that I am going to reveal. You really just need to know one thing: frozen banana.
If you freeze a banana and then run it through the blender with some liquid, you get something that’s almost soft ice cream, without any fat or dairy. You can do this with fruit juice, but my favorite kind is banana-chocolate. I have started to make these again regularly since I was reminded of them by the Starbucks smoothies, which bear a rough similarity. (And man, is it cheaper at home!)
To start, you need to freeze a banana. If you had one heck of a blender you might be able to do this with a whole banana. Assuming your usual home blender instead, what I do is slice the banana, spread it out so the pieces don’t stick to each other – as in the photo – and freeze.
For a texture kind of like a milkshake, you need about ½ cup milk (low fat is fine; heck, water might even work) for a normal-sized banana. You can make this as thick as your blender will tolerate, and eat it with a spoon, but these proportions should be drinkable with a straw.
Put the milk, banana, and chocolate syrup (you don’t need me to tell you how much chocolate syrup you like, right?) and blend till smooth.
Don’t over-blend and give the bananas time to defrost, because you want to consume this while it’s still mostly frozen. It does get a little goopy as it melts. For the same reason, don’t slice the banana too thin, or it basically melts while you’re blending. Your blender probably lies around doing nothing most of the time anyway, right? There is no need to coddle it.
Anyway, if you did it right, you should get something that’s an awful lot like a chocolate-banana milkshake. It’s some kind of banana magic. Really, if you think about bananas too hard, you might conclude they are a plant from another planet. If you’d never had one before, would you guess it was a fruit? Probably not. And that texture is also unlike any other fruit when frozen and blended.
But stop thinking about it and drink, your smoothie’s melting!
6 Comments
Beans on September 19th, 2008
I want to go make one right now!
Andrew on October 2nd, 2008
Awesome. I love banana smoothies. I’m something of a smoothie junkie, actually. You might want to check out this recipe: http://www.raw-food-health.net/BananaSmoothie.html
Yuuki on October 29th, 2008
AAAWSOME! IM ONLY 10 YEARZ OLD AND I THINK DAT DATZ SO FRIGGIN COOL!!! IMA MAKE IT 4 me,my mom and my brother!WHOOHOO lol jk but really im make it 4 us! 
=O D
Yuuki on October 29th, 2008
lol yeah wat jim said..*smiles*
Snackerrific :: » Snack Review: Diana’s Bananas Banana Babies on November 20th, 2008
[...] that Starbuck’s Vivanno thingy that they aren’t allowed to call smoothies, or else my own frozen banana concoction – which has taught me the virtues of the frozen banana. So I was attracted to these, although the [...]
Jim on September 10th, 2008
Thanks for the concoction, Linda. You had my co-workers drooling over this.