Boiled Banana Muesli & Friends

We have a banana tree in our backyard that bore us a batch recently, and we had all these extra bananas even after giving plenty away, which were gonna ripen at the same time. So I was ordered to administrate the leftovers while my parents went on a holiday...

... and this is the result: banana muesli.

But there's a difference - I boiled the banana in the milk first. (I don't like the name, but heck, I don't know how else to call it. If you can think of something better, I would be very happy to take suggestions. ^_^)

Why boil the bananas? Well, most fruits tend to become more flavourful and even much sweeter after you cook them. This process brings out the flavour of the banana, and when mixed with the milk, makes it really delicious. In fact, before adding in the oats, the banana milk mixture was as flavourful and almost as sweet as artificially-flavoured commercial banana milk.

Here's the recipe for a shortcut.

Ingredients

1. fresh milk (as opposed to UHT... I just prefer the former's flavour)
2. oats
3. very ripe bananas, where the skin is turning black
   Unless you don't like your muesli too sweet. I generally like my bananas very sweet for cooking, so I waited until the last moment for these.

Instructions

1) Put some milk to boil - enough to cover the bananas you'll add in later.

2) At the same time, slice up the bananas and microwave them. I microwaved 6 bananas for about 2-3 minutes, until they were thoroughly cooked.
(If you have reservations about microwaving, see my footnote in an earlier post on the issue.)

3) After the milk is boiling, add the bananas in. Stir and turn off the heat within a minute. Leave to cool

Why microwave the bananas first? Two reasons:

• Microwaving saves time and makes this preparation process so much easier. If you boil them in the milk from the start, you'll have to boil them for quite a while before they get cooked.
• More importantly, if you boil them in the milk for too long, the acid in the banana curdles the milk, and the boiling process accelerates the separation of the curd from the water in the milk, making the resulting curdled milk mixture kinda lumpy and gross. It won't be creamy at all.

4) After the banana milk has cooled, add in the oats, then chill in the fridge until you want to eat it. I suppose you could also have added the oats to the milk while the milk was boiling (but before adding the bananas), or immediately after turning off the heat, if you prefer it as a cooked oats porridge dish. It's just a different texture I guess.

I even experimented with some flavours by adding milk drink powders! I first blogged about them in this post.

Banana Malt Muesli

I used Carnation Malted Milk for this. But you can use any malted milk powder - like Ovaltine or Horlicks. As long as it can dissolve in cold milk.

Just dish out whatever amount of muesli you want, add in the powder and mix it up!

This was my favourite combination! I guess it more like comfort food for me, because I love malted milk.

The malt and banana flavours went very well together. And the salt in the malt mixture complemented the sweetness of the banana too!

Choco Banana Muesli

I used Ovaltine Rich Chocolate powder for this variant.

It was nice too, as you know chocolate and banana are a common combination. But I personally preferred the malt combination.