TGRWT#11 continued Bananas and Cloves

Pisang Goreng Extra
This is what you need: 2 semi-ripe bananas and for the batter: 3 heaped tablespoons riceflour, good pinch of salt, water and heaped teaspoon freshly ground cloves, for frying: quite a lot of sunflower oil.
This is what you do:
Put the riceflour with the salt in a bowl and mix in enough water to make a light batter. Stir in the not too finely ground cloves. Use enough for your taste. The first batch I made was only with a pinch and that was clearly not enough. The flavour disappeared during the baking process, though the smell was strong enough in the batter.
Cut the bananas in the length in halves and the halves in two parts. Dip them in the batter and fry them in very hot oil in a non-sticky fryingpan till golden brown. Serve immediately.

And this is what it looks like in detail: creamy soft banana in a spicy clovecrust. Yummy! A bite of the soft bananas with a little lump of clove brings out a very rich taste. The aftermath, when the flavour comes back through the nose, is wonderful.

TGRWT#11 Bananas and cloves

Food experimenting molecular style, this edition of They Go Really Well Together is hosted again by Martin Lersch at blog.khymos.org/ and our quest is to combine bananas and cloves. Very inspiring.
The Dutch have a strange preference for yellow hard unripe bananas without any taste or smell. Odd, in view of our colonial past. I remember as a child sitting on the veranda and spooning out a very ripe banana. Delicious. For me a banana starts being edible when the smell is overwhelmingly sweet and the peel looks like this or even more brown:

For baking a banana should not be too ripe, or it will stick to the bottom of the frying pan or come apart. This ripe they were just right.
More tomorrow, with the adapted Indonesian recipe for Pisang goreng (Baked Banana).