Does anyone else have a 50% depreciation in their banana investments? What I mean is, do you throw out half of the bananas you buy? We do. Yeah, yeah, I know you can wrap the stalk with plastic or whatever to help keep them around longer. I’m not doing that. The benefit is bananas are cheap as shit, even the organic ones, as well as pretty nutritious. If you had to eat real, real cheap you could go with beans, rice, bananas, and potatoes and still live well without getting rickets.

Yes, we’ve all had that annoying friend who has told us bananas used to be totally different, they were smaller and once had seeds. “Hey,” they said, “did you know bananas blah, blah, blah.” Yeah, dude, human beings have really fucked around with nature for as long as we can all remember and even beyond. I think bananas are the least of our concerns. Ok, ok, yes, yes, they were once smaller, full of seeds, probably tastier and more chock full of nutrients.

Sidebar: I just thought of Wacky Packages. This weirdo sticker company that did parodies of well known grocery products in the late sixties, seventies, and eighties, nineties… I had some of these as a kid. I also had a ton of Garbage Pail Kids. Same type of idea there except GPKs did these extremely violent and disturbing images with people’s names attached. Yeah, they were pretty gruesome. There’s even a webpage dedicated to the worst ones. Not sure if these would ever fly nowadays. It’s quite possible they added to creating my warped sense of humor along with Mad Magazine, MTV, and the mega amount of processed sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and gluten I was shoveling into my body on a daily basis.

Back to the banana. It’s one of those flavors, along with apples and berries that you use to compare to everything. Like when you taste a cherimoya you don’t say it tastes like a cherimoya you say it tastes like banana and bubblegum. Sommeliers around the world would be depressed if they couldn’t say a wine tasted like fresh berries, or stewed berries, or yada yada.

The banana. What a weird fruit. Inedible and chalky as hell until that one moment of yum! and then gross and soft and inedible the next day. They’re up there with avocados as the most annoyingly mercurial perishable food items to have around. Why can’t they take a page from the orange which can sit and sit or the potato, it’s starchy proud uncle? Ha (I once put a cocktail on the menu called Proud Uncle, named after my friend’s bowling ball, didn’t sell too well).

So what is it about the banana we love so much? Is it just so firmly ingrained within our subconscious from childhood? Pretty much every sweet drink I quaffed down as a kid, Snapple, those weird “juices” my parents thought were nutritious, others, had banana in it and I’d be hard pressed to find a human being who doesn’t enjoy a banana. And the chemical which gives it that unique flavor? It’s an ester called isoamyl acetate. Creepy right? Where do they get these names? Why couldn’t they have called it something cool like liquid banana hammock? Anyway, that ester (flavor molecule) is what we’re looking for in cocktails and pairs so damn well with rum but also bourbon. There’s been some research on the topic. Isoamyl acetate, which is an organic compound, they say, doesn’t actually taste like banana because it was based on a now extinct banana, the massive Gros Michael Banana (not the guy from Family Ties) A.K.A. Big Mike. Yeah, you can’t make this shit up.

“I ate Big Mike last night. Lots of banana, that guy.”

Something called the Panama Disease, wiped all the Gros Michaels off the planet and we were left with the version we eat today. Yup, not your grandma’s big banana. Hey, aren’t you glad you read this blog today? So the isoamyl acetate you taste in your Jell-O, Runts, and Laffy Taffy, maybe even the cheap ass, shitty banana liquor you buy from BevMo! is the remnants of Big Mike. The bananas of today still retain the familiar ester, it’s just not in the same amounts we’re accustomed to which is why artificial banana flavor seems a more pumped up, more ultra banana, than the version we eat today.

Pretty interesting, no? Some lab in jersey is producing all this stuff I think. I first read about it in this book called Fast Food Nation, back in the day before The Omnivore’s Dilemma and all that other eye opening stuff started coming out. Yeah, it’s technically “organic” but somewhere a bunch of evil magicians are whipping this stuff up in giant batches and selling it off to corporations who don’t give a rat’s ass about anything except making a buck off the average consumer. Maybe, just maybe, the reason why it tastes so odd isn’t because Big Mike isn’t around anymore but because it’s artificial and anything in that category gives me the fucking willies.

Let’s bring it back full circle here. This is a bartending blog after all. Ever had a bananavardier? That’s a good one. Just add a splash of banana liquor to your boulevardier. Add more and less sweet vermouth if you so choose and a touch more of your chosen bitter. It’s really, really good with a product called Granada Vallet, a Mexican aperitivo that is high proof and insanely bitter.

You can also whip together a batch of bananum and have a really good time. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite secrets.

End Zone

2 oz.Bonded Bourbon

1 oz. Fresh Lemon Juice

1 oz. Bananum

.5 oz. Allspice Dram

Shake, strain over a BFR, top with a few dashes of ango. This one will surprise you.