[Modernist Cuisine at Home] Pressure caramelized banana

[Anonymous Modernist 5911]

Hello!! I tried the Pressure caramelized banana but it was a disaster!!!! It burned and took me a while to clean the pressure cooker. What I realized is that 28minutes cooking is too much!! I could not find any correction for this on the web site.

Someone have tried it with successful result?

Thanks,

Alberto.

[Anonymous Modernist 10374]

I made this recipe with no problems at all.. Did you quick release the pressure or let it come down naturally? That's the only thing I can think of.

[Anonymous Modernist 2826]

Hello! The exact same thing happened to me (the burning and spending quite some time cleaning the pressure cooker episode, I mean)! I wonder if it was due to the size of the PC and quantity used in the recipe…. I will wait for more feedback here before I attempt to do it again…

[Anonymous Modernist 5911]

I sent an email to them and the 28 minutes is correct. I put 500g as well. I wil try again but this time I will do 5 min at a time and i will add 1 tablespoon of water.

I realease the pressure as soon as the time was done! Could be the type of the bananas. Not water enough. I let you know when I retry it.

Thanks

[Anonymous Modernist 310]

I had a couple of extra bananas so thanks for the idea! First comment is taht they have really big bananas in Seattle because with 3 of them I had only 350g. (70% of the recipe) I was a little nervous following your experience but I followed the recipe exactly. It came out a dark brown color. It was great and I will plan to have more extra bananas in the future! Two points to try to help you. The first one and what I think is probably the cause of the problem. Maybe you kept the burner too high during the cooking and your PC vented the steam. There is not that much extra water in that recipe and if you're venting for 28 minutes it may cause a problem... If that's not the case since there was not much content at the bottom of my 6.5l Kuhn Rikon I didn't put the power to the max to bring it to pressure. My induction cooktop is quite powerfull and I was afraid to burn the bottom before having enough pressure so I di it at ~70% power and it came off perfect. Hope I could help you a bit, keep us informed of your next results Louis-Frederic

[MikeMac]

Try the Pot in Pot method - one of the advantages to having a large pressure cooker.

Put the trivet that came with your pressure cooker in the pressure cooker then add maybe an inch of water then take a plain stainless steel bowl that fits inside the pressure cooker with at least 1/2 inch of clearance all around put the banana mixture in that and steam away.

This is NOT my idea I got it from

http://missvickie.com/howto/cooking101/pipinfo.html

And has saved me a lot of pressure cooking scrubbing.

I am sure glad I bought a good sized pressure cooker - see other post on this

[Anonymous Modernist 5911]

Hi all!!! I think the problem was the burner too high, in medium instead of very low, as LFMichaud posted. I redid it using the same proportion of water used in the carrot soup and it was fine this time. I will re-try without water.

I don't know why they didn't put the percentage in variation of the soup and puree recipes.

Thanks you for the help.

[Anonymous Modernist 310]

Just one thing to be carefull for the PIP method is that you may dilute your recipe with all the steam. Probably if you do it in a mason jar you would be OK since it's covered.

[Anonymous Modernist 14573]

I made this recipe this morning and it was fantastic. I had read this post before so I was cautious. I made sure I used 500g of banana and I added 30mls of water as per the carrot soup recipe. I intended on using it for a pancake topping so I was not going to puree the mixture at the end. I cooked it for 20mins and was happy with the result. If was pureeing the mixture I could have easily cooked for another 8 minutes without worrying about drying it out. I am new to pressure cooking, but it seems to be important to have the gas burning just high enough to maintain pressure, I had more success using the biggest burner on the lowest setting rather than a smaller one on a higher setting.

The end result was beautiful, but a little syrupy, I will try again without the water. The colour of my cooked banana was darker than the colour indicated in the book.

[Anonymous Modernist 19280]

Add me to the list of FAIL on this recipe. I carefully measured everything and used the full 500g of bananas but ended up with a burned mess.

Using a 10-yo Fagor pressure cooker that has served well in most other Modernist @ Home recipes I've tried -- carrot soup, variations on that (salsify, yum!), caramelized onions, garlic confit. It did fail on the refried beans for refried bean foam; however I then tried again following the cooker's user manual for generic beans and it worked.

This time I tried to be patient and use med-low heat to get up to pressure but the little yellow indicator never popped up after 30 minutes, even after gradually increasing heat to med-high.

Was looking forward to use this in a breakfast salad with avocado, roasted beets, jalapeno and pea shoots -- but I suspect raw bananas will be fine as that's what the original recipe calls for.

[Anonymous Modernist 14583]

I'm sorry I didn't see this thread before posting my experience in a new thread, but I also carbonized 2 batches of bananas and spent an hour trying to clean the cooker. Also, in the pie recipe, the coffee was way too strong. As a result, the recipe was a failure. I tried high and low heat, still just burned the bananas. Was I to be adding water? I'd sure like to make this work. If it did, is the banana flavor stronger so it is not buried by coffee cream flavor? Thanks, Steve

[Anonymous Modernist 25000]

I failed with this one as well. What I ended up doing with the burned mess was to add some water to the pot, repressurize it, and pressure cook the baked on bananas for half an hour. It wiped out pretty easily after that.